Bear Cage
by Kthonia
Summary: An adult David Collins, in 1985, has a reunion with Barnabas and Julia who are living in northern Japan. Of course they all get into seriously weird trouble. Based on the original series.


Bear Cage

**April 1985 – Hirosaki, Japan**

"Excuse me, uh, _sumimasen_? Can someone help me?"

A twenty-nine year old David Collins walked against the flow of college students who poured around and past him like a river of silent faces. Expressionless Japanese all looked so similar with their ink-black hair and their olive-toned skin. They stared at him, unashamed to gawk as if he were wearing a Halloween costume at Christmas dinner. _Gaijin, gaijin_, they whispered among themselves. The girls clung to each other nervously, on guard against the alien creature that he seemed to be. Their staring did not bother him much. By now, he was almost used to it.

Six months he had spent in the rural countryside of this foreign realm where everything was so different from his childhood home. Yet in so many ways, Japan with its homogeneous small-town mentality was very much the same as Maine. _If only you knew_, he thought, what he wished to say to the students. _I am not the thing you should be afraid of._

A head taller than anyone in the crowd, David Collins continued making his way down the corridor of the university. The décor paled in comparison to Yale, his own alma mater. Hirosaki University had an unglamorous industrial feel as if someone had remodeled the inside of a factory with classrooms. The linoleum floor was a harsh gray. The right-hand wall was constructed of cinder blocks. Aluminum window panes ran the whole length of the corridor, from the entranceway's double doors to a dead-end that displayed a case of sports trophies.

"Hello, excuse me...? Could you...?" He turned left and right in an awkward dance of trying to catch someone's attention. _No_, he thought bitterly. _I have their attention. They're just too shy to talk to me._ Perhaps he would not be so annoyed if not for his exhaustion.

"Professor Collins," he called into the crowd. "Does anyone know Professor Collins?"

A pair of young men finally stopped for David. They were painfully thin, almost anorexic, making their jaw lines and high cheek bones more prominent. Their cotton shirts hung from their bony shoulders like a closet rack.

"_Corrin-zu Sensei_?" the taller of the two young men pronounced the name with difficulty.

"Yes, _hai_. Professor Collins is my cousin. _Onegaishimasu… doko desu ka_?"

The two exchanged a few words with each other that sounded nothing remotely like the ten-week course in conversational Japanese that David had crammed. He could barely make out any recognizable syllables at all, just gibberish that to his ears sounded like, _dugga-dugga-dugga-dub_. Before coming to Japan six months ago, he had learned of the variety of regional dialects outside of the standard Tokyo vernacular that was spoken on the nightly news and taught to foreigners. David knew the concept—the difference between Walter Cronkite's neutral accent and the fisherman's slang in the wharfs of Collinsport—but he had not experienced it in another language. He was both intrigued and dismayed at how useless his preparation had been.

They took hold of his elbow and pulled him along. David smiled with relief and gladly let himself be led wherever they would go. They escorted him up a flight of broad linoleum steps.

On the second floor, the corridor was nearly deserted. A few students rushed here and there, racing to any of several identical doorways, frantic to pull open those dull steel knobs before the clock on the wall struck eight-thirty. David smirked, slightly amused at their panic; they had two minutes to spare.

The two young men led him to one of many identical doors, marked only by a small white placard with some Japanese characters and the number fifty-five.

"_Corrin-zu Sensei..._ here," David was told. The two men nodded quick bows of good-bye and hurried away to the stairs.

"_Domo arigato."_

By their hasty exit, David wondered if they were afraid of the grumpy old professor. He watched them over his shoulder and felt something close to pity; they had no idea what terrible things were in the world that a man truly should fear.

He knocked twice and, without waiting for a reply, he entered. It was a small room compared to an American university, more like a high school class. Desks with steel frames were arranged in neat rows. The students sat rigidly, facing forward, textbooks and notepads open, mechanical pencils poised and ready. They all turned at once to look at him, and he startled slightly at thirty-five faces in uniform movement.

"David, is that you!"

The voice melted away the years, that deep-toned Shakespearean inflection and the powerful volume of it all. From only a few feet away, the voice of Barnabas Collins resonated in David's gut like the beat of a marching band's bass drum.

"Hi, cousin Barnabas. I'm sorry to drop in like this but it's important. Can I talk to you for a few minutes?"

Barnabas addressed his students, "_Jyuppun go ni modotte kimasu," _meaning he would return in ten minutes. David was impressed at the older man's command of the world's most difficult language. He had obviously done more than a ten-week course in basic conversational phrases.

The students all nodded at once, in understanding, and lowered their heads to make quiet, private study of their textbooks.

Barnabas picked up his stylish walking cane with the die-cast handle of a wolf's-head in serpentine style. That, and the onyx signet ring on his index finger, were the only two things about him that had not changed. As they strolled together into the vacant corridor, David slowed his pace to match the tortoise like movements of the older man.

Salt-and-pepper gray hair looked a bit thicker when it wasn't slicked flat with black pomade. At last, he had stopped combing his bangs into jagged points. Barnabas was not as tall as he remembered, or perhaps it was because David had grown into a man. They were about the same height now, just exactly at six feet. Nevertheless, for a man in his late fifties, he appeared to be in good shape without the slouch or the beer belly that men of his age so often developed. Except for the fact that he moved more slowly, Barnabas still maneuvered well and with a subdued strength. His walking cane tapped in a steady rhythm alongside the click of his polished Oxford shoes.

"I must say, David, I am astonished to see you. However did you find me?"

"Not from my father or Aunt Elizabeth, that's for sure. They have no idea where you are." David chuckled as if trying to make an inside joke. Barnabas did not share his mirth. "No, ironically, I tracked you down through the CPAs."

"The accountants, you mean?"

David nodded as his smile faded; stodgy cousin Barnabas never approved of abbreviating anything. "You're still getting monthly dividends from Collins Enterprises."

"Those are wire transfers to an international bank. I still don't understand how you could..."

"They have access to the bank records, and they told me where you last made a cash withdrawal."

"That's confidential information," Barnabas said, scowling deeply now.

As they continued walking together, David shifted and put a little more space between them. "Yeah, I know, but I said it was a matter of life and death that I had to find you."

"Is it?" Barnabas looked to him. At the same height, he stared intently dead on.

"A matter of life and death?" David's jaw shivered a little as he rubbed a hand over his mouth to pretend it was a yawn. "No, of course not. Everything's fine. It's fine, really. It's just, well, there's some news in the family."

"It must be important if you couldn't simply use the telephone."

_You have a telephone now?_ David was tempted to ask, knowing the older man's bizarre eccentricities and aversion to the most basic of modern technology. "Yes, it is. Some Japanese investors have made an offer to buy Colli-"

"What!" Barnabas looked ready to choke. "Are you saying, 'buy Collinwood.' Surely the idea is not under serious consideration."

"I'm sorry, but it is." David reached into the pocket of his gray canvas overcoat. He brought out a folded packet of papers enveloped in a pale blue card stock.

He raised his cane to point at the legal document. The silver wolf's head did the snarling on his behalf. "What on earth is that?"

"They're offering twenty million dollars. Can you imagine? Twenty million dollars for that run-down heap of bricks." David waved the paper at him. Barnabas backed away, repelled. "All they ask is that any member of the family, who might have legal standing to challenge the sale, sign a waiver relinquishing all rights of inheritance."

"Never."

"Wait, please, hear me out."

"I've heard enough." Barnabas spun on his heel and started back for his classroom door, moving more quickly on the return.

David trotted after him. "Twenty million dollars! My father choked on his glass of sherry. He argued with Aunt Elizabeth for an hour or so, and then she agreed to it too."

"And your cousin?"

"Carolyn's living in Connecticut with some New Age commune; she doesn't care."

Barnabas reached the classroom door and stopped there. With his hand on the knob, the dark-stone ring was like a tiny black hole that sucked in the brilliant sheen of the florescent lights. "And your cousin Quentin?"

"He laughed when he signed it, and said the place should have been bulldozed years ago."

"Mmm," Barnabas growled.

"Look, Quentin said you'd be a tough sell. We all understand you have a sentimental feeling for the place, but the fact is, you haven't set foot in Collinsport in almost fifteen years. If you really love that old house so much, you would've found a way to come back for a Christmas or two, instead of... wherever the hell you've been."

The young man choked up and stopped talking. He took a few steps. David halted in the middle of the corridor, in the middle of emptiness, and just stood there facing the beige wall.

"David," said the older man more gently. Somehow that deep tenderness when speaking his name gave him chills. "Have you missed me?"

_Yes!_ He wanted to cry out, but instead he said, "Sometimes it got pretty boring when you and Willie Loomis and Doctor Hoffman weren't around anymore."

"It was only a couple of years until you earned your high school diploma. Afterward you went to Yale, is that right?"

"Yeah, I got my Ph.D. in archeology."

"Congratulations."

"I did my dissertation on comparing neolithic burial sites in Africa and Asia and South America. The past few years, I've done a hell of a lot of traveling. Maybe we've crossed paths and never knew it."

"Perhaps we have."

"Ironically," David chuckled to try and hide his rising tremors of nerves. "I've been working a job here in Japan for the last six months."

"Really? Here?"

"Yeah, I'm up at the Hokkaido island in the museum of Hakodate City. I'm helping to identify and catalog some artifacts of the native people."

"The Ainu," Barnabas suggested.

"Yeah, you've heard of them?"

"Very little, I regret to say. I would be fascinated to hear your insights and what you've learned about them." Barnabas glanced to the closed door, his attention returning to the lecture he was late in giving. "Would you do me the honor of joining Julia and me for dinner this evening?"

"That'd be great." David put the legal paper back into his overcoat's pocket. "We can talk some more about selling Co-..."

"We're not going to talk about that anymore. The subject is closed as far as I'm concerned. However, I would very much enjoy your company for the evening." Those black eyes glimmered with as close to affection as the craggy old face could muster. David stared back at him, astonished to realize for the first time how desperately lonely Barnabas was... and always had been. "Shall I pick you up from your hotel at, say, six o'clock?"

David said breathlessly, "Make it seven. I have some, uh, business to do first."

##

David rode an old-style diesel train, a smelly steel box like something that had survived an attack by Godzilla. The train took about thirty minutes up to the coast from the college town of Hirosaki to the port town of Aomori.

He transferred to the ferry and rode another three-and-a-half hours on choppy waters, gulping Dramamine and hanging onto the railing all the way across the famously treacherous Tsugaru Straits. Someday he would be able to ride a train between the islands. The Japanese government was sponsoring an ambitious infrastructure project to excavate a railway tunnel in the sea bed much in the same way as the proposal being developed in Europe to connect France to England across the channel. This year, 1985, was an amazing time of ambitious modernization—bullet trains, jumbo jets, personal computers—and David wanted so much to share in the excitement of this prosperous, global society. But being a Collins, his feet were rooted in the past generations, and now... even more so.

David disembarked in the coastal village of Hakodate that reeked of seafood and salt-water, reminding him of the wharfs at Collinsport. Though the people looked different, and sounded different, it was a sort of parallel universe where the most basic of sensory elements remained constant. Fish still stank like fish, no matter where you went. David strolled through a marketplace where squid, clams, scallops, and salmon roe floated in blue plastic buckets.

He briefly considered stopping at a _ramen_ vendor's push cart, where customers crowded around the portable stove and with chopsticks slurped their hot noodle soup standing up. He had not eaten all day. The ramen's fragrance, carried on the sea breeze, made his stomach gurgle. But he could not stop; there was no time to stop. He dreaded where he must go, but he had no choice. Hopping onto a diesel trolley, he made the final leg of his journey.

The great pentagram-shaped fortress, Goryōkaku, was being restored as a national park. David walked the ramparts that had been smashed by cannonballs over a hundred years before. He tread on a fresh green lawn where scores of men had once lay bleeding to death. How serene it all was, now, with tourists posing with each other for photographs and reading their guide books in the bright sunlight. Cherry trees were in full bloom, and the slightest breeze shook flurries of snowy petals from the black branches. A little frost lingered in the shadows, making white of the darkness.

Children frolicked to the rim of the moat and gazed down the embankment. _Dumb twits,_ David thought bitterly. _They have no idea what's underneath their feet._

The museum's main door was wide open; it always was, in the daylight hours. David shivered a little to come inside out of the sun.

"Konnichiwa, Corrin-zu San," said a young woman in a military style suit dress, and white gloves, and a yachting-type cap on top of her bowl-cut black hair. She bowed from the waist to greet him.

"Konnichiwa," he replied.

David hurried past her, leaving the girl to stand like a robot sentinel at the door waiting for the next tourists to enter the museum, waiting for her next chance to bow and say hello.

By rights, he should have gone upstairs to report to the curator that he was not here to do work, today, so soon after returning from his visit to Maine. He had fabricated some excuse for going into the storage room... just for a few minutes. He had rehearsed on the ferry his impassioned plea to be given time off, just one more day. Now he had a little bit of truth to sprinkle into the mix: he was going to have dinner with his cousin in Hirosaki town, and needed time to catch the last ferry back to the main island.

Instead, he ducked into the creaky old stairwell and descended, his penny loafers pat-pat-pattering down the blackened slats. Nothing was locked. Doorways of wood paneling slid open easily at his touch. He passed through room after room, of ever more ancient dusty clutter, the armaments and relics of a hundred years ago... two hundred years ago... a thousand years ago... and the native Ainu basketry and stone spears and bearskins. Each room was like a portal to another time, where the people of past generations had just left a few minutes ago and their belongings remained untouched for when they would soon return.

At last he came to a dead-end wall that seemed to be solid. David closed his eyes and swallowed the lump of dread in his throat. How sorely he wished he had the willpower to just turn away, to leave the museum and go back to the little college town where he could have a pleasant supper with his cousin Barnabas and his... wife? Had he married Julia Hoffman by now? Or were they still, as his father had so often remarked with a snort of disapproval, living in sin like a pair of over-aged hippies? David squinted his eyes, and a small tear leaked out. If only his thoughts could be filled with family gossip instead of what he was about to do.

David reached overhead to the molding that framed a section of the wall. He felt about until his fingers clicked in a latch, and the panel released. He slid the section aside just far enough for his slender body to enter the dark secret passageway beyond.

Stone steps chiseled into the earth by ancient peoples made a slanted, treacherous stairway down, down, down into a man-made cave. A square chamber with stone walls, no larger than the Collins family mausoleum, was graced with a reddish gold hue by the faint shine of paper lanterns.

His loafers felt weighted with lead as he approached the core of the chamber.

An inner room showed through a square stone archway. David stopped a few feet away from its threshold and dared not go any closer. His legs quivered. He felt a force like the ferry boat's deck rocking and the pull of gravity compelling him, step by step, closer to the threshold of the door.

He sank down to his knees like in church. Then he continued descent onto his hands and crouched over putting his forehead to the cold stone floor.

"My lord and master," he whispered.

Inside that inner room stood an elegant Japanese man of about thirty years old, dressed in an old style black kimono and grayish-blue hakama pants. He had awesome hair like a heavy metal rock star. Shaggy bangs framed his cruel face in a crab's pincer hooks. His huge ponytail was close to the length of a real horse's tail, tied in a blue cord at the top of his head. Only one thing was anachronistic in his costume: an antique gold pocket watch on a chain affixed to the obi belt at his slender waist.

"Hello, David. I have been waiting a long time for you." The man softly spoke with a very faint accent, carefully enunciating his Ls and Rs with better English pronunciation than anybody David had met in this country so far. _Of course_, he thought wryly. _He's had plenty of time to practice._

David raised his face away from the floor but remained crouched on his heels. First he brought forth a rolled up newspaper from his coat's lower pocket and tossed it over the threshold. "There's not much excitement in today's headlines, master. Some stuff about Golden Week, I think, and Emperor Hirohito's butterfly collection."

"The emperor," said the samurai with a lilt of disdain as he bent over to pick up the newspaper. David found the man's tone curious; didn't all Japanese worship their emperor?

Once again, the fire of curiosity warmed David's courage, and he put aside his terror long enough to gaze straight into the room. As always, it was a bizarre collection of old things and new things: a writing desk no larger than a footstool, a manual typewriter, a wooden bureau for storing his clothes, lacquered black boxes and dull-finished bookshelves, a pirate trunk with leather straps and brass buckles, and a rack of long-barreled shotguns. _Who are you?_ He felt tempted again to ask. _What __is your name? Are you in the history books or do you wish you were?_

"Have you brought me something more than the Yomiuri Shimbun?" the man asked, tossing the newspaper aside to a pile with the other papers and magazines near a futon pad on the floor.

"Yes, master, I have. You'll be very pleased. I had a good visit with my family, and they've agreed to sell you the house."

David reached into his coat's breast pocket for the collection of blue envelopes. One by one, he slid them across the threshold. Always his fingertips stopped short of the chiseled bricks that separated one room from another.

The man sank easily to his knees and settled down with his own calves for a cushion. Although they were now seated on the floor, face to face, David still felt as if he crouched beneath him. One at a time, the samurai unfolded the blue card stock. By the light of candles in paper lanterns, he studied the typewritten letters.

"Roger Collins your father... Elizabeth Collins Stoddard your aunt... Carolyn your aunt's daughter... Quentin Collins your cousin..." The man looked up from the papers, and his black eyes glittered as darkly as Barnabas's ring. "There is one missing."

"No," David said.

"You have one more living cousin." A chilling breeze came from nowhere. Candles flickered inside their paper globes. David shivered.

"Oh... Yeah, I guess so... He's kind of a distant cousin, several generations removed. Does it matter?"

The man rocked back on his heels and smoothly rose to stand. The hakama pants straightened into a stiff pleated cone that concealed his feet. David had learned in Japanese folk tales that ghosts did not have feet, and he fixated on the hand-stitched hem that seemed to meld in with the floor.

"Were my instructions not clear? Every living member of the Collins family must relinquish their claim to the house for the sale to go through."

"But why?" David asked. "My aunt's name is on the deed. She gave Barnabas permission to stay on the property as long as he wished, but he doesn't legally own an interest in the estate. He never paid rent. He was more like a guest, really. He doesn't even live there anymore."

"Who is this… Barnabas?" His accent flattened the R to almost sound like the pretentious country-club accent of David's own father.

"He's an old distant cousin from the England branch of the family. We didn't even know he existed until he showed up about twenty years ago and lived with us for a while. But he moved away and spends his time traveling around Asia and stuff."

"Have you made an attempt to contact him?"

"Yeah, I talked to him today." David winced at his own blunder. Why was it so impossible to hold back from blurting the truth to him?

"Today?" The man strolled across the inner room. His footsteps—if he had feet at all—were whispering scratches on the stone. "Are you saying that he is here in Japan, now?"

"Yes, my lord and master, he is a guest lecturer at Hirosaki University."

"Hirosaki," the man said, the word rolling beautifully off his tongue. "The castle town, I know it well. On my journey north, I stayed overnight at a roadside inn that gave me an exquisite view of Mount Iwate."

"I'm guessing that was a long time ago?" David asked, hoping for a clue to his master's identity.

"Yes, it was... a long, long time ago." For a moment, his tone was melodic with nostalgia, and oddly he reminded David of his cousin Barnabas by the fireside relating tales of family stories from generations past.

The man turned abruptly, snapping himself out of a daydream. "Did you tell your cousin Barnabas the price I am willing to pay for that house?"

"Yes, but he wasn't exactly interested."

"What 'exactly' did he say?"

David twisted his lips in an effort to hold back, but like a burp after chug-a-lugging a beer, it could not be contained. "He said, never. He refused before giving me a chance to explain. But... but in all fairness, I had caught him at a bad time. He was in class, you know, ready to give his lecture. I'm sure if I meet with him again, tonight, for supper, like he invited me... He'll listen to me. He's always liked me. I can persuade him, I'm sure I can."

He went quickly to the pirate chest on the floor and hurled the lid open. Inside the chest were stacks of solid gold bars, each stamped with the three-diamond logo of the Mitsubishi company which until recently David had only known as a manufacturer of automobiles that was driving Detroit into the ground. Now he understood that Mitsubishi was a corporation established centuries before, much like the Collins family, and their mark was stamped on more than just economy cars.

The man picked up one of the gold bars and brought it to the threshold of the door. He tossed it outside to David, who caught it one-handed. Yale's baseball team had taught him quick reflexes.

"Offer him that as part of your efforts to persuade him."

David put the gold bar down on the floor. Wracked with shivers, he said, "I don't think Barnabas can be bought off. He's got his own fortune in England. He's never seemed to care about money, or need money. He never borrowed a dollar from my Aunt Elizabeth but he always seemed to have... everything he wanted."

"No man has everything he wants. Think, David, if it is not money, what does your cousin desire to have in his life?"

"I don't know." David stared at the floor, amazed at himself that he did not know the heart of a man although he had spent so many hours listening to him talk. "He's kind of weird. He likes history and antiques. He reminiscences about the ancestors a lot. Sometimes it feels like he'd rather be living with them instead of here and now."

The samurai turned away again. He strolled to the opposite wall, where a horizontal rack displayed two long swords with elegantly braided handles and crimson tassels. The sword rack was on a black bearskin rug.

"This is interesting," said the samurai, stroking the lacquered scabbards. "He is an interesting man. Perhaps I should speak with him in person."

David watched the mood of the man admiring the swords on the rack, and a new flavor of fear chilled his guts to the core. "No, no, please... Please, my lord and master, please don't hurt him!"

"Stop whining, you child!" the man barked. "You understand that, if I decide his life must end, there is no pleading that can change his fate. He is a stranger to me, and a foreigner, and I care nothing for him. Do you know that I have ordered scores of men to their deaths? I have condemned the traitors and deserters of my own group: men that I had lived with and fought with as brothers. When they turned their hearts against me, and defied me, I enforced our rule against them. No matter how much I loved my friends, I sat in judgment without pity and watched their blood gush to the floor. It was our primary law: once you have enlisted in the Shinsengumi, you cannot ever remove your name from the roster. If you wish to take off our white-and-blue coat, you must cut open your stomach and leave us as a corpse."

_Shinsengumi, Shinsengumi,_ David repeated in his mind so he would not forget until he managed to find an encyclopedia.

"But master, if you kill him, you risk exposing your secret. These aren't the old days of the shogun..." David took a chance throwing in that word he learned from the mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain that he'd seen on television. When the samurai did not correct him, David's confidence surged that he was getting closer to learning his master's name. "You can't just slice a guy in half and walk away. That sort of thing is against the law, now, and the world is a lot more crowded than it was in your lifetime. There's nosy neighbors everywhere. Jeez, I can't even take out my garbage without some old _oba-san_ yammering at me about how I'm putting the recyclables in the wrong bag with the wet trash or the burn trash. There's police at the train station. How are you going to make the trip back here safely, on the ferry, if you're carrying a sword that's dripping with blood?"

"I carry a kerchief to wipe my blade as soon as I have completed the kill," he said coolly. "And, with much practice, I have perfected the technique of turning away at the moment of strike so the blood spurts in the other direction. You would be impressed, David, at how cleanly I can walk away from a scene of slaughter."

"Oh god." David bowed his head over his crossed arms and tried very hard not to vomit.

The man strolled back to the threshold of the door, and he sank to his knees as close to the edge of the frame as he could be. His face was a mask of utter serenity, without malice or violence. He sat quietly for a few minutes, fascinated to watch the young American weep.

"I can also be a merciful master," said the man softly. "It does not give me pleasure to kill. I only do what is necessary. Tell me, David, you know your cousin. What is necessary?"

David wiped his wet face with his coat sleeve. "Can I... Please, can I have one more chance to talk to him? I know I can get through to him, I just know it! I'll meet him for dinner tonight."

"What will you say?"

"I don't know yet. I'll think of something."

The man's thin lips twitched at the corners, and David wondered if that was his effort at a smile. "The greatest swordsman in our group was much younger than you are, and he would never go into a duel so unprepared."

"I'm not going into a duel. I'm just going to have dinner."

"No, you are wrong. You will carry the flag of your lord and master against the enemy who blocks his advance. You will either be shot full of arrows, or you will break through the line and capture their flag."

David nodded along, entranced by the monotone chanting drone of his master's voice. "Tell me what to say."

"I will give you more than words. I will give you an advantage. When you go to negotiate with a rival, you are wise to first send spies to infiltrate his castle and learn his deepest secrets. Only then will you have influence over an elder man."

David's mouth lightened into a smile that lifted his cheeks. "Barnabas doesn't have any secrets. He's kind of boring, sometimes."

"Every man has secrets, things he would rather sell all his worldly possessions than to have brought into the light."

"Not Barnabas, no, I don't think he's got anything to hide. For the longest time, I was pretty sure he was gay with Willie Loomis, but now that he's with Julia..."

"Quiet."

Just inside the door frame, almost out of David's line of sight, was the corner of a household Buddhist altar. David had seen them in homes: a delicate display of photographs in black frames, little brass gongs, bowls of fruit or rice, and a dish of incense sticks. It was to this small altar where the samurai reached and brought forth a single stick of incense.

He used a silver-plated Zippo lighter and snap, snap, raised a flame to sparkle briefly at the incense stick's tip. He puckered his lips into a small O and gently blew the incense smoke over the threshold and into David's face.

"Remember... Remember, what you have forgotten. Think of your cousin Barnabas Collins and remember..."

David heard the whistle of a _shakuhachi_ wooden flute, and his mind reeled as if being gassed at the dentist for a root canal. Old dark monochrome memories came to light in his mind, old nightmares that he had cast away from his conscious thoughts. Once more, he stood in the foyer of Collinwood mansion staring up at an oil portrait on the wall. A regal, dark haired man stared out from the frame. The portrait wore an old-fashioned suit like Paul Revere, a jeweled medallion at his vest, an onyx signet ring, and held a cane with a wolf's head. Then he saw a living man with the same face, standing in front of the portrait admiring it as if seeing himself in the mirror, and holding the same cane, and wearing the same black ring. David remembered being a mischievous child prowling around the basement of the Old House where Barnabas lived. He had found a coffin there—an empty coffin with Barnabas standing beside it—and how angry Barnabas was at him, that made him scream and run upstairs. _He's going to kill me! _Julia Hoffman had saved him with an arm around his shoulders, _He's not going to kill you... are you, Barnabas?_ Another time he had gotten lost in the woods and became trapped in a secret vault in the family mausoleum. He found an empty coffin there, too. And he thought of several recurring nightmares of Barnabas: his mouth open wide showing Dracula fangs or arising out of a coffin. _Dead men don't get up and walk away. _His imaginary friend Sarah the ghost had told him, _Sometimes they do_. One night, wide awake, a large vicious bat had swooped into his bedroom only to vanish into thin air when his Aunt Elizabeth heard him screaming and opened the door.

The incense stick finished. The samurai blew the ashes out of the palm of his hand to sprinkle in the air. "Your cousin is very interesting."

"What the hell? Did you get me stoned?"

"The smoke helped you remember. When I breathed the smoke, I saw your memories too. Your cousin Barnabas is very unusual."

"No, no, what I saw... what you saw... that was childish stuff. I was a screwed-up kid from a dysfunctional family, and Barnabas used to spook me out with his creepy house. I had a few years of therapy that helped me accept it was all my imagination. I saw him today, and he's nothing like what I remember. He's just a grumpy old man."

"He is a demon."

"What?"

"The portrait on the wall of your home, tell me, who is that?"

David sighed a smile of relief, of course, everybody remarked on the resemblance. It was an explanation that he had well rehearsed. "That was the first Barnabas Collins, born in the seventeen hundreds, who moved away to England and was never heard from again. He got married over there and had kids, and they had kids, and so on, down to my cousin Barnabas who decided to pack up and return to his ancestor's homeland in Maine. He showed up on our doorstep when I was about ten years old."

"He is the same man in that portrait. He has lied to you."

"That's impossible. He's maybe pushing sixty, but nobody's two hundred years old!" David gulped at how silly his statement sounded in the face of a living samurai from the days of the shogun.

"He is a creature unknown to me. This is a legend of your foreign lands. Tell me, what is it called?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you know in your heart what it is. Tell me, so I can help you prepare to face him. He is immortal. His teeth are a wolf's fangs. He desires to drink your blood."

David's eyes went dry for being so wide open for so long. "And I dreamed he sleeps in a coffin in the basement. Jeez, are you saying he's a vampire?"

"Vampire," the samurai repeated, his slight accent softening the V closer to a W.

He laughed in wild, girlish twitters. "You're crazy! That's impossible! I've seen him during the day in the sunlight. Vampires can't stand sunlight, everybody knows that."

"It appears he has done some sorcery to fool the world into believing him to be human, but the facts are clear. They are in your heart. You know this to be true."

His laughter ran out of breath, and he gasped in dizzy spasms. More memories came out of the cobwebs, things that had seemed unrelated. But now, looking back with an adult's sensibility, he saw connections where there had been none before. Around the same time as Barnabas first appeared on the doorstep of Collinwood, livestock of local farms were mysteriously mutilated and drained of blood. Young girls were attacked frequently on the wharves of Collinsport harbor, bitten in the neck until they fainted from loss of blood. David used to paste newspaper clippings in a scrapbook that he hid under his bed. The coffee shop waitress Maggie Evans was kidnapped and held captive for months by a psychotic rapist who traumatized her so completely that when she was finally rescued, staggering in a crazed delirium in the cemetery, she had no memory of what had happened.

"No, no, it can't be." David's voice wavered with uncertainty. His most vivid childhood memories of Barnabas were of him sitting in a chair reading books.

"You understand, now, why he is resistant to selling the house. He feels it is _his_ house, not by the law of modern men but by the ancient law of blood. It is the lair for his demon soul. Tell me, David, do you know if his coffin is still kept in the basement?"

"Oh my god. This is insane!" David's legs started to tingle on the way to falling asleep from sitting in that position for so long. He rose to his feet and flexed his calves to refresh the circulation.

"Confront him with the threat of exposing his secret, and he will sign the paper."

"If you're wrong, I'm going to look like a total idiot."

"I am not wrong." The samurai bent his chin forward, and his long curved bangs hung away from his cheeks.

David rubbed his hands together, the palms slick with sweat. "I guess you would know, huh, one demon to another?"

"Yes."

David shivered so hard his teeth chattered. It was the first time that his lord and master admitted to what he was.

"You must do as I tell you, David. You have until tomorrow, at dawn, to bring me his signature on this legal paper, or you know the penalty for failing me."

David gazed down at the old, brown blood stains on the floor and thought of his first day on the job. When he discovered the secret panel in the storeroom, and came down the stairs, he had found the last person who had served the master. The museum's aged antiquities catalog clerk had lain in a heap of gray sausages—his own entrails. When David had stumbled and slipped in the puddle of half-dry blood, a tattoo burned itself onto his forearm. Four stylized Japanese characters had appeared on David's arm in blood red ink, and from that moment, the lord had owned him.

Though his legs were sore, he dropped once more to his knees and bowed his forehead down to the floor between his hands. "Yes, my lord and master, I shall do as you command."

"Go now."

David rose and ascended the shallow, dusty stone stairs, ascending up to the sunlight of a real world where old things stayed in their boxes. He closed the secret wall panel behind him. He wished with a prayer to an un-answering God in Heaven that it would be the last time, but knew with a heavy heart that he would return.

He felt embarrassed and ashamed as the stoically cheerful girl at the entrance way bowed to bid him farewell, please come again, in a rapid pattering of syllables.

On the return ferry ride, David watched the vivid colors of a sunset enhanced by air pollution to brilliant crimson and purple and gold. He had not meant to come back this late. It would be dark soon. Old childish fears nipped at the back of his mind, and he took a deep breath to shake them off. It was not the dark he should fear; it was in the light where menace thrived.

_I'm going to make a fool of myself tonight, but I must obey. I can't… not… obey_.

##

From the ferry, he took the old diesel train that carried him inland to the town of Hirosaki. The train was packed with high school students on their way home from after-school tutoring. Girls wore their navy-blue sailor dresses, and the boys with shaved heads like Buddhist monks in dark Nehru jackets. They all carried heavy leather book bags and did not speak among themselves. Their expressions neutral, all riding out the hours until the day should end... and another begin. Occasionally one of the students snuck a peek at him, the _gaijin_, the foreigner who stood out in the crowd with his nut-blonde hair and pale skin. _If they only knew_, he thought, _I am not the strangest creature in their midst._

From the train station, he jogged the open streets of the country town. Street was a generous term for the narrow ribbon of pavement that seemed to have no structure, no pattern, just the wandering track of black asphalt on a snake's trail through the grassy farm fields and between artless buildings. He jogged faster and faster a weaving course dodging bicycles and pedestrians; so many people, even for a small town. It was dark, now, and he gave up checking his wristwatch. Barnabas was nothing but punctual, and he only had a few minutes until seven o'clock.

Running full out, he reached the place where they had agreed to meet: the parking lot of a discount department store called D-mart, its garish enormous letters in bright red and blue shining over the entrance way.

When Barnabas had offered to pick him up from a hotel, David confessed that he was staying in a bachelor apartment in Hakodate near the museum. As a counter proposal, when David had offered to meet Barnabas at his temporary housing supplied to guest faculty by the university, the old man had replied that it was too difficult to give directions; none of the streets had names. Addresses were organized according to sectors and city blocks and individual buildings. It reminded David of the family home, Collinwood, that probably had an official street address on file at the post office, but David had no clue what it might be. Everyone for miles around simply knew the house by name. If you did not know the route of that lonely forest road, you had no business being there in the first place.

At the door of the D-Mart store, David checked his wristwatch. He had eight minutes until the hour. He panted, but not heavily, after the two-mile run from the station. It felt good to open up his legs and get the blood flowing again, to feel alive and normal if only for a little while.

_A vampire... How am I going to accuse cousin Barnabas of being a vampire?_ David tugged his overcoat straight, and in patting smooth the flaps of his pockets, it occurred to him that he did not have any of the usual vampire hunting paraphernalia. D-Mart had a gardening center with wooden stakes for sale. _No_, he thought, _I'm not that crazy_.

He dashed inside the cold light of florescent bars and madly searched the cluttered shelves. Though the building was large, the space inside was cramped. The display shelves packed close together more like an over-sized 7-11 than a major retail chain. He passed by the women's make-up section with an array of Shiseido cosmetics for sale.

He found the jewelry section and picked up something that he had never owned in his life; perhaps it was long overdue to start carrying one. Then, remembering his manners, he grabbed a bottle of Hakutsuru sake. He paid in cash with colorful paper bills. The cashier bowed to return assorted yen coins offered in a shallow blue plastic dish. David hurriedly stuffed the items in his jacket's pocket on his way out the door. A recorded voice intoned to every customer at the exit, _domo arigato gozaimashta_.

In the parking lot, already there and waiting for him, was Barnabas with a two-door white Toyota compact car. He had not wasted time seeking out a parking space; he had simply stopped in the middle of everything. Other cars and bicycles without complaint flowed around him.

"Hello, David."

"Hey, cousin Barnabas, I got you something." David held out the bottle of sake. It was a weird, awkward moment, Barnabas in the driver's seat leaning an elbow out the window, reminding David of the iconic line from the Robert de Niro movie, _Are you talkin' to me?_

"Thank you. Please, get in."

David walked around to the opposite side of the car and got into the left-hand seat. The car was a two-door and extremely small for David's long legs. His knees bumped the dash board. He reached down between his ankles and searched for a lever to scoot it back, as Barnabas gunned the engine and pulled recklessly into traffic.

"So," Barnabas began. "Did you finish your business?"

"Yes, I had to go up to the museum and check on something. Sorry it took all day to get there and back on the ferry." David shifted around in the seat, looking if he could catch Barnabas's reflection in the car's side mirror. Yup, there he was, just as anyone would be. Not a vampire... unless the myths were wrong.

"That's fascinating work. You must be enjoying it very much."

"Yes I am."

Barnabas started into an intersection. A car coming from the right-hand side swerved to avoid him. Barnabas slammed on the brakes, tossing David forward with a lurch. Horns honked at him and angry drivers shouted what had to be foul epithets, but in a foreign language it didn't feel so bad. Barnabas remained stoic, his hands lightly grasping the wheel. When the immediate danger had passed he once more pulled into the intersection and turned to continue on his way.

David asked, "You have a driver's license, don't you?"

"Of course, an international one, but I don't actually drive very often. It's usually Julia that..." He drifted over the line toward the right-hand side of the road like in America. Before the on-rushing headlights reminded him, Barnabas steered back to the left.

David gripped the dashboard. "Where is Julia?"

"At home, cooking dinner for us. She enjoys cooking, although she doesn't have occasion to do it very often. I'm not much of an epicurean. I prefer simple fare—a little salad and rice, or sometimes a sandwich—but when I told her that you were coming over, she got ambitious with the cookbooks."

Once again, as Barnabas turned a corner, he swung too wide and almost wound up on the wrong side of the road. David closed his eyes until he felt the car straighten out.

"No offense, cousin Barnabas, but you really suck at driving."

"I... 'suck'?" he repeated.

David looked at him in profile and studied the man, as he had often stood in the foyer of Collinwood to stare at the oil portrait and memorize every detail of that craggy face. The mistakes were like someone who had never driven on the left-hand side, and yet his cousin had always claimed to be from England.

"I guess you didn't do much driving when you were growing up, either?"

"No, I didn't," he answered smoothly. "I learned to drive an automobile later in life."

David blurted out, "Do you know how to ride a horse?"

"Yes," he said lightly, to imply, _can't everybody_? Barnabas paused and for a moment his eyes narrowed as he seemed to focus on the road, but David could see in the flicker of his brows that he was carefully considering his next words. "I've spent a great deal of my youth in a rural setting."

"In England?"

"Yes, of course, in England."

"And there were horses? Like what, farm horses or polo ponies?"

Barnabas did not answer. He turned once more into a narrow alleyway, pulled up under the wooden awning of a two-story building with blackened timbers, and then announced, "Oh, here we are!"

David followed him to the front door. The structure was old, at least a century or two, and had that sort of haunted permanence of a place that mourned for outliving its occupants.

The original door had been replaced with a modern double-panel of glass in aluminum frame, When Barnabas slid aside the door in its track, the metal on metal squeaked like dying mice. "Atrocious, isn't it, to ruin the décor of this beautiful old house with this garish piece of tin. If I had my way, I would replace the door with its original paneling."

David tugged off his penny loafers and placed them neatly on the little shelf. Barnabas set his Oxfords next to the loafers. Several pairs of sensible flat pumps—women's shoes—filled the rest of the shelf's space. Doctor Hoffman apparently did not own any heels.

"Is that you?" Julia Hoffman's voice sounded exactly the same, a female voice but lacking any melodic quality. David imagined that she could declare, I love you, with the same tone as reporting, your test results are back.

Barnabas carried the bottle of sake into the one narrow room that extended from the front door to a rear sliding door. He put the bottle on the dinner table, and then continued strolling to the far side of the room. There he took a stand by the window and gazed outside to a moonlit tea garden.

_Are they not married_, David wondered. _Or have they been married too long? He didn't even say hello to her._

David stepped from the shoe alcove to a richly polished wood floor. He braced himself for the onrush of her welcome. Julia gripped him by the shoulders and smacked a wet kiss on his cheek. "My, you've grown so tall!"

Julia's short curly hair had turned shock white, but the rest of her had not changed much. She still wore too much make-up, heavy mascara and fake eyelashes, brushed-on rouge that enhanced the sharp angles of her face. She wore a barbeque-style apron over a white blouse and blue business skirt.

"It's good to see you, Doctor Hoffman. You look great."

She smiled and fluttered her eyes. "Oh, thank you, that's sweet. And please, call me Julia."

Barnabas turned away from the window. "Is supper ready?"

"Almost!" Julia ducked into a connecting doorway decorated in a half-curtain of lace. David noticed that the curtain was not cheap machine-made lace, but the good stuff. He suspected that it was not a woman's touch but Barnabas the antiques expert who had chosen it.

David removed his overcoat to a hook on the wall. He stood by a bookshelf crammed with hardbacks and paperbacks turned sideways to fit. More books stacked on the coffee table and the floor.

"So, is all this yours?"

"Yes." Barnabas went to a credenza for a pair of little sake cups.

"But you travel around so much. How do you carry all this crap with you?"

"I employ people to help me."

"Like Willie Loomis?"

Barnabas cracked open the sake's metal cap by holding the neck of the bottle and twisting the way a ninja would snap his enemy's neck. "Yes, like Willie. I haven't seen him in years. How is he?"

"He's fine. Still lives in town. I heard he got married."

He did not flinch in the slightest when he poured sake into the little cups. David watched him closely for any reaction at all and saw none. Odd that he could reminisce fondly about the ancestors for hours but seemed to have no sense of nostalgia for a personal friend.

"I'm glad to hear it," Barnabas said. "Willie was always a good man at heart. His only fault was that he was too easily manipulated by the wrong sort."

"You straightened him out, though. I'll never forget the change in him, right around the time that you arrived in town and hired him as your handyman."

Barnabas raised his own sake cup in a toast. "Let's not talk about Willie. I want to hear more about you and this fascinating work at the Hakodate museum."

David sipped his cold sake while carefully watching to see if his cousin really did drink his. Could vampires drink anything other than blood? What would happen if he did? Barnabas tilted back the thimble-sized cup and indeed gulped it down.

"It's been a great learning experience," David said. "I've been mostly involved with the Ainu artifacts, cataloging them and entering them into the computer database."

"Computer!" Barnabas snorted at the word and poured himself another jigger of sake. "Infernal contraption. I refuse to touch one. As if typewriters weren't bad enough."

David chuckled softly. "I love computers. It's helping me keep track of so much information, it's incredible. I'm writing a research paper that I hope to present at next year's international conference, about a comparison of Ainu shamanism and bear worship to the totems of the Inuit in the Northwestern United States."

"Shamanism," Barnabas repeated thoughtfully, holding his second cup of sake but not drinking. "Do you believe that the power of shamans is real, or is this purely an intellectual exercise for you?"

"I don't know. I have respect for their beliefs. I've interviewed some of the Ainu elders—what few are left after all these years of colonization and forced assimilation. If they tell me that their grandfathers described totem spirits speaking to them, or having visions in their dreams, I take them seriously. But I'm also a little sad that those sorts of things don't happen anymore."

"Magic is dying out of the world," Barnabas said wistfully as he gazed in the direction of the kitchen door. Julia clattered pots. Water bubbled. The electric rice cooker chimed. Aromas of soy sauce and chicken wafted through the house.

"Be ready in a minute!" Julia called out.

David took a seat at the table. It was small, like everything had to be in Japan, no wider than a cafe table with four upright chairs and placemats of pressed bamboo. Barnabas lit a tall candlestick at the centerpiece. For a moment, when the match flared, the glow from underneath his chin made him look older and younger at the same time.

"So what are you teaching at the university?" David asked.

"Early American Literature. We're starting with James Fenimore Cooper's _Last of the Mohicans_, and then we'll move on to Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_."

"That's some pretty heavy material. Are you sure they can handle it? I mean, English is their second language."

"What would you suggest I use in my syllabus?" Barnabas sat down at the chair opposite his cousin.

David thought for a moment, and replied, "Edgar Allen Poe?"

"I've read Poe. I did not care for it." Barnabas looked over his shoulder to the kitchen. "Julia?"

"Just a minute!" Behind the curtain came the sound of eggshells cracking, and then the whisking of a fork in a bowl.

David asked, "So while you're teaching all day, what does Doctor Hoffman do?"

"She's a guest researcher at the university's microbiology lab. They're doing some fascinating work in the experimental treatment of blood cancers, leukemia and lymphoma, as well as the new plague of this generation: AIDS. A terrible thing, don't you think, for a body's immune system to prey upon itself."

David looked down into his empty sake cup, thinking back to childhood memories and searching for connections. "I thought she was a psychiatrist. You mean, Doctor Hoffman is a microbiologist who studies rare blood disorders?"

"Yes, I daresay that she is one of the most brilliant minds in the world today. We've just spent a year at the University of Mumbai, in India, where she advanced their department by decades..." Barnabas abruptly cut himself off, mid-sentence, and reached for the sake bottle. "Would you care for a refill?"

"No thanks. I'm not much of a drinker." _Not like my father._

Barnabas looked up to the ceiling and made a thoughtful yet disapproving study of the light fixture. It was a simple globe on a brass chain; probably from the D-Mart. "Do you like this old house? It's utterly charming, is it not? Its construction dates back to the late 1700s, during the Edo period, when the shogun enforced the policy of closed borders. Our Collins ancestors sailed the world in those days, to Shanghai and Kashmir and Persia, but they were not permitted to dock in Japan. Under penalty of death, not a single foreign ship was allowed to put into shore. Think of what a waste it was! All of this glorious culture locked away behind closed doors. It would have been wonderful to come here, then, don't you think?"

"That's the time of samurai, wasn't it?"

"Yes, they were the noble class."

"They're all gone, now, aren't they?"

"Technically," Barnabas said. "In the 1870s, they were officially stripped of their rank and prestige. Many of them were killed in the Meiji revolution but they never really went away entirely. There are those living today who remember their heritage, who have pride in their ancestors' names."

At last, Julia emerged from the kitchen with the rice pot gripped between two quilted oven mitts. She set the rice on a trivet and returned through the lace curtain to fetch the saucepan. "I hope you like chicken and egg! It's called oya-ko, meaning parent and child."

David waited politely for her to scoop him up a hefty portion, basically a soy-sauce flavored chicken omelet on rice. "Thank you, Julia, it looks great."

She served a smaller portion to Barnabas, and then filled her own bowl. Smiling, she took a chair at her companion's right-hand side.

David asked, "Do you know when Japan ended its isolation policy?"

Barnabas nodded, poking at his food with chopsticks but not yet taking his first bite. David watched him curiously; he had seen the same sort of finicky behavior in girls at the college who were obsessed with staying thin. "In 1853, President Fillmore sent a fleet of navy ships to anchor themselves in Tokyo harbor. Commodore Perry aimed his cannons at the city and threatened to blow them all to smithereens if they didn't open the country. That was diplomacy in those days!"

"And that was the end of the samurai."

"The beginning of Japan's modern era, yes." Barnabas finally put a pinch of food into his mouth. Julia watched him more like a doctor than a lover, making sure that he chewed and swallowed what was good for him. Ever the polite gentleman, he dabbed with the napkin before continuing. "I believe one of our cousins Jonathan Collins—the second son of Gabriel Collins—was serving aboard Commodore Perry's ship and participated in the occupation forces. I heard from Quentin that he brought back some rather beautiful souvenirs such as that ceramic vase in the foyer next to the grandfather clock."

"The pentagon-shaped fort at Hakodate was built around that time," David said. "The shogun learned of the design from foreign books and implemented it immediately to defend against cannon fire. It's based on the work of a French engineer, Vaudan, who served in the court of King Louis XIV."

"Yes, Vaudan." Barnabas nodded at the name, almost as if he knew the man personally. "Some of his work is in Collinwood, did you know? The tower in the West Wing was constructed in France and moved, brick by brick, to the province of Maine."

David fixed his stare on Barnabas across the small table. Maine was originally part of Massachusetts, not yet a state in its own right at the time Collinwood was built in the 1790s when the first Barnabas Collins had lived there. That phrase, province of Maine, had rolled so naturally off his tongue that one could wonder if he had ever accepted the fact of statehood.

Julia leaned forward. "Barnabas tells me that you're trying to convince the family to sell Collinwood to a Japanese investor? Is that true, David?"

"He's offered twenty million dollars for it. Everyone's jumping at the chance. Cousin Barnabas is the only hold-out."

Barnabas put down his chopsticks. "I thought we agreed not to talk about this at dinner."

"No," David said. "We need to talk about it. Can't you understand how important it is to me to unload that place and put the past behind me?"

"Surely you have some happy memories of your childhood?"

"A few, but not enough to balance against the horrors and the nightmares."

Barnabas leaned back in his chair and crossed his slender hands over his chest. His pale skin sharply contrasted his dark suit. The onyx ring made a black spot on his index finger. "You're exaggerating."

"I was home-schooled by a governess. I had almost no friends my own age. My only companions were..." David took a breath for courage and blurted out what he had not spoken aloud in years. "...ghosts, yeah, ghosts! Collinwood is haunted by all the miserable souls who died there before, and they used to talk to me like I'm talking to you now."

"Have you asked the ghosts to sign your legal paper?" Barnabas said with a lilt of sarcasm. "After all, they are residents too."

"They don't talk to me anymore." David rubbed his forearm where, underneath his sleeve, the tattoo had started to sting. "Sometimes I miss them, more than I miss my own family: Josette the bloody-faced bride..."

"Josette," Barnabas whispered looking down with sigh. David saw a tint of melancholy and wondered, if he were a two-hundred year old vampire, did he know the real Josette in life?

Doctor Hoffman coughed into her napkin.

"And little Sarah," David continued his long-buried memories. The ghost's image was still so clear in his mind, as real and solid as anyone of his family. Sarah had appeared to be a girl of his own age with waist-length hair and wearing an 18th century gown with a granny bonnet and a lace scarf around her shoulders.

"Sarah…." Barnabas wistfully looked into the flickering candle flame. "Yes, I recall Roger was very concerned about your obsession with that imaginary friend."

"I haven't thought about them in years," David said. "They seemed so real, at the time, but a crap-load of therapy convinced me they were just the escapist fantasies of a very lonely little boy."

Julia's broad flat smile stretched her lips very thin, and oddly, made David more uneasy than if she were to frown. "I'm so glad you finally got the help you needed."

"I don't think they helped me, not really." David avoided her stare by looking down into his food. Lumps of chicken in a layer of scrambled egg; parent and child, boiled together, being consumed together. "Sometimes, lately, I'm not so sure that they weren't real. Do you know what I mean?"

"Barnabas tells me…" Julia began and hesitated, her eyes rolling to survey the ceiling as if her next words could be found written there. "…you've earned a Ph.D. in archeology? Do you have any particular area of interest? Have you published? Are you involved in any research projects?"

"Are you trying the change the subject?" David asked.

She chuckled lightly as she looked to the older man's profile. He had not said a word. He had not moved. He stared at David, and it seemed he had hardly blinked.

"Have you ever seen a ghost, cousin Barnabas?"

"Perhaps I have," the older man said softly. "I would rather not talk about it."

There was the opening. David leaned over the table towards him. "Can't you make an effort to understand why I want to sell it so badly? I'm following your example, after all. I want to get away from the gloom of the past and meet someone special and, maybe, get married someday and have normal kids. Not screwed-up kids like me, but regular kids who can laugh with their friends and play baseball and sleep through the night without screaming. It's a miracle I turned out as well as I have, but I'm not quite... not quite whole, not yet. Please, cousin Barnabas, sign the paper and let me sell the house. You owe me that much."

Barnabas furrowed his brows and his dark eyes glowered in the candlelight. "How is it that I owe you, David?"

"You gave me nightmares."

"Did I?"

"I blocked them out for years, but recently I remembered that I used to dream of you with fangs."

Julia reached across the narrow table to put her hand on David's wrist. "Let's not argue. How do you like the oyako?"

David ignored her reaction and kept staring dead-on into the cold, hard eyes of the man whose likeness was captured in an 18th century oil portrait.

"You had a coffin in your basement!"

"A lot of useless things were stored in my basement. By the way, you had no business sneaking about in there. You could have fallen down or hurt yourself."

"You were furious to find me there!"

His dark eyes fixed on David with the cool stare of a cat watching a mouse. "I was concerned for your safety."

"More like you were worried about restraining yourself from what you wanted to do to me. I dreamed of you rising up out of your coffin and coming in the night to kill me in my bed."

Julia said, "These are very peculiar insinuations, David, and I must beg you to... to stop, and consider what you're saying. Barnabas would never dream of abusing you or, God forbid, molesting you in any way. Think about it carefully: he never once laid a hand on you, did he?"

"He wanted to."

"No, no, no you're wrong," Julia insisted. "He loves you, David. You're family! If you could only appreciate all the things he's done for you."

He looked the older man straight in the eye. "You wanted to bite me."

"David!" Julia cried.

"You wanted to suck my blood."

"That's enough!" Julia stood up. "I can't believe what's gotten into you!"

A silent Barnabas hardly seemed to be breathing.

David pulled the blue envelope from his jacket's pocket and slapped it to the table. "If you don't sign this paper, I'll challenge you in court. I'll make you do it, cousin. I don't want to, but I will."

At last, he answered, "How will you make me do it, David?"

"I'll make you produce a legal birth certificate, in a sealed envelope, direct from the royal registry in England where you were supposedly born in—what—the nineteen thirties? What a joke."

"I fail to see the humor."

David felt he had run up to the edge of the diving board and other people were on the ladder below waiting their turn. He gazed down at the sparkling blue waters of the pool, so far below, but he had no choice. He could not turn back. He could only jump.

"You weren't born in England."

"Oh? Where do you imagine I was born?"

"Same as me, in Collinsport… Only you were born over two hundred years before me."

Julia clutched her scarf. Barnabas merely poked at his food with the tip of his chopsticks, as undisturbed by the tirade as if listening to a radio program. "Of course I was born in England in 1932. My birth certificate is properly registered, and a court order will prove it to be so. I also have a passport from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island. Would you like to see it?"

"It's a forgery."

"You're being silly, now. I assure you, my passport was properly issued by the civil authorities."

David started to tremble and reached his hand into his pocket for his last desperate act. "Then you must have used your vampire mind powers to compel someone in the civil office to make the documents genuine."

Julia went as pale as candle wax, but Barnabas simply smiled a thin line. He said, "Vampire mind powers? Really, cousin, you've seen too many late night movies on the television."

David yanked out the bit of jewelry that he had purchased at the D-Mart. He thrust the silver crucifix across the small table, holding it straight at the older man's face.

Barnabas flinched backwards and started to raise his hands—palm out—to defend himself. It was a knee-jerk reaction, an instinct that could not be faked or restrained. It took a moment, not long, before he drew a breath and gathered his cool composure.

"You fear the cross," David accused.

"Nonsense, I was startled by your sudden movement."

David tossed the crucifix with its chain next to Barnabas's crumpled napkin. "I dare you to touch it."

Julia swooped around behind Barnabas's chair and made a grab for it, but he put his hand over it first. She cried out, "This is silly! Have you both lost your minds?"

Barnabas closed his fist around the bit of jewelry. In that pause, David watched the contours of his craggy face. It seemed that even the old man was not entirely sure of what would happen next. Slowly, he turned his fist around, opened his fingers, and displayed the silver crucifix laying cool on his palm.

"There, you see? I didn't burst into flame or any such nonsense." Barnabas tossed the crucifix back at him, his annoyance clearly bordering on rage. Those dark, dark eyes that peered intensely at him, and for the first time in fifteen years, David felt a primal urge to run for his life. "Are you listening to yourself? Do you know how ridiculous you're sounding? Look at me, I'm going gray! I wear eyeglasses for reading. You've seen me in the daytime... in the sunshine. You've seen me, just now, eating and drinking."

"It's a trick," David said, his mouth dry. "You've used witchcraft or something to let yourself appear human."

"Oh, we're believing in witches now, too?"

Julia, becoming more agitated, gripped the back of Barnabas's chair. "Stop it, both of you, this is absurd. It's the twentieth century! There's no such thing as vampires."

The master's voice echoed in his memories, _You know the penalty for failing me._ David challenged him, "Look me in the eye, cousin Barnabas, and tell me straight. Tell me that you've never prowled by night or sucked someone's blood."

Barnabas rose from his chair and turned away. "I won't dignify that question with a response." He strolled across the room, the weight of the years straining his joints. He stopped at the window to stare out at the crowded dark city illuminated by blue streetlights.

"Avoiding the question isn't giving me an answer!" David called to him across the room.

Barnabas turned back, then, and returned to the table with a bit more composure, a smooth gait with a balance like a prowling cat. "This is a very peculiar mood you're in tonight. Why won't you let the matter drop?"

Julia rested her hands against Barnabas's chest, a gentle way of holding him back. "Let's change the subject. Tell David about our trip to Tibet..."

"No, Julia, he wants to hear the truth from the horse's mouth." Barnabas looming above the table looked down at him, and David in his chair felt very small again like a child being frowned upon by his elders. "Listen to me carefully. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a vampire by whatever definition you have for such a mythological creature."

"You're lying."

Barnabas narrowed his eyes and peered at him more intensely. "Why do you insist on this?"

David whispered to himself, "He can't be wrong."

"Who?"

"What?"

"I heard you say, 'he' can't be wrong. Did someone put you up to this?"

"No, I said, how could _it_ be wrong. 'It.'" David exaggerated his New England accent, eeee-it. "On the plane, I had a nightmare and I thought it was a memory from my childhood. It's silly and stupid. That's why I want to sell Collinwood so badly! Look at how growing up in that place has screwed with my mind."

"I understand completely." Barnabas came around to stand by David's side of the table. He rested a gentle, fatherly hand on the young man's shoulder.

"I've behaved like an idiot. I'm sorry."

"No apologies necessary." Barnabas's patted him comfortingly and gradually his touch stroked the collar away from his neck.

David pulled away. "Hey, what are you doing?"

"Checking for vampire bites," he said coolly.

"What? Didn't you just say there's no such thing?"

He pointed to David's arms and ordered him, "Roll up your sleeves."

"No! What, am I getting strip searched now?" David huffed a few times, and then decided it would do no harm to show his bare arms. There were no vampire bites. His lord and master would not be revealed; the secret would be safe. David unbuttoned his cuffs and pulled up the sleeves along with his canvas jacket, like the cops on _Miami Vice_. He extended his bare forearms to the candlelight. "There, see? Or do you want to start looking in pervy places, now?"

"Hmm," Barnabas murmured. "Tell me, David, from all those years ago, what was the name of Carolyn's motor-biker boyfriend?"

"Why?"

"Answer the question."

David thought for a moment, seeing his cousin in her young rebellious days smooching in the foyer with a Hell's Angels wannabe, and arguing with Aunt Elizabeth, _I can see Buzz anytime I want!_ "His name was Buzz."

"That's correct." Barnabas paced behind David's chair. "I doubt that you're possessed..."

"What?"

"...and yet, you are behaving peculiarly." Barnabas looked again to his forearm and noticed the tattoo in blood red ink, the four stylized Japanese characters. "When did you get that tattoo?"

David yanked his sleeve down to hide it. "You're not supposed to see that."

"Why am I not supposed to see it?"

"My..." _My lord and master! _"...my father would throw a fit. You know he thinks tattoos are for degenerates and drug addicts."

"I won't tell Roger," he promised. "I'm intrigued by the design. What does it say?"

David slid his arm under the table. "I don't know."

"You had four _kanji_ characters tattooed into your arm, and you don't know what they say? I find that odd, David, very odd."

"You're odd."

"How long have you had it?" Barnabas asked, patiently.

"I don't know."

"May I see it again?"

"No, you can't see it. You shouldn't see it!"

Julia gasped and clutched her neckerchief more tightly, twisting the paisley silk into knots. Barnabas calmly kept his focus on the young man as he addressed her, "Julia, go and pull the _kanji_ dictionary from the bookshelf. The one with the yellow-and-green book cover, not the paperback."

David hugged his arm to his chest and covered the tattoo with his other hand. "It's just a stupid tattoo. The artist put it there; I don't know what it is, and I don't care."

"I don't believe you," Barnabas said, in a very quiet, steady voice. "I think you _do_ care. You care very much."

David stood up. "To hell with you! I'm sorry I ever came."

He grabbed the young man's arm with a sudden burst of strength. "Who is your master?"

"Let go of me! No one is my master."

Barnabas released his grip. "My apologies. I should not have been thoughtless enough to ask. Of course, you are unable to betray him, if he has you enthralled to his will."

"What the hell are you talking about? There's no one, no one, I said!"

"Don't be afraid. You can trust me, and don't let on to your master that you've betrayed his confidence. I wouldn't want him to punish you."

_You know the penalty for failing me._ "No!" David shrieked as a flood of tears burst out of his eyes. He started sobbing, right there where he stood, with a shivering desperation that could not be contained or controlled. "You stupid feeble old man! What do you know about anything?"

"David, I..."

He burst into a run, scrambling to escape the house. He left behind his overcoat and his penny loafers. Like a crazed man, he dashed into the streets in nothing but his socks.

He ran and ran, opening up his legs to eat up more ground. He kept running aimlessly in the dark of the night, safe for now in the comforting cool shroud of darkness. He dreaded the rising of the sun, when his lord and master would also arise and demand his presence. It was the light in the east that David feared, for then he would need to face his master and report that he had failed.

##

David pressed his forehead to the cold stone floor. "My lord and master."

Today he had changed into European style clothes, an old fashioned suit more like something Charles Dickens would wear than a samurai. It was a frock coat that reached past his knees, and underneath a dark wool vest with tin buttons. He wore knee-high horse boots, proving that he really did have feet. So he was not a ghost. As always, the gold pocket watch dangled its chain from his vest's center buttons.

"What do you have to give me?"

"I need more time."

The samurai stepped closer to the threshold, his riding boots clump-clumping heavily on the stone floor. "This answer does not please me."

"I confronted him, like you told me to, and he denied it. I couldn't get him to admit it, and he passed every test! I can see him in a mirror. He drank some sake. He held a crucifix in his hand."

"You have failed me."

"Please, master, give me more time! I have not failed you yet. I might not be able to prove that he's a vampire, but I can get him to sign the paper. I just need more time."

He said, "Stand up, David."

With legs quivering at the marrow of their bones, he rose to his feet.

"Come closer to me."

"Oh god, no, please."

"Do not be afraid. I will not hurt you. I am not angry."

"You're not?" David ventured a step nearer to the threshold of the door.

"I am not surprised you have failed. The adversary has outmatched you. I was wrong to send a student in the place of the teacher." The samurai reached under his coat and from his leather belt pulled out two identical daggers with pearly handles and slender steel blades.

"What are those?"

"Catch." The samurai tossed one to David.

Afraid to clutch at a sharp blade in mid-air, he let it fall clattering to the floor. _Oh god_, he thought. _This is it. He wants me to slice open my stomach and kill myself. I must resist. I must refuse!_

"Pick it up, David."

Without a word or hesitation, he bent over and picked up the knife. It was cool to the touch and not so heavy as he had expected. His Swiss army knife weighed more.

"Step closer to the door. Come here to me."

David shuffled his feet forward until he stood nearly toe to toe with his master. "If you kill me, they'll come looking for me."

"I am not going to kill you, today."

"You're not?"

The samurai tilted his head in curiosity. "Did you want me to? Do you hope that death will end your service to me?"

David bowed his head and looked to the knife in his hand. "What do you wish me to do?"

"Make a small cut on your hand, like this." The samurai pressed his twin blade to the heel of his right hand and opened a gash about two inches long. "It does not need to be very deep. You must only draw out the blood."

David aligned his own blade with his left hand's pinky finger. He paused, said a prayer to the God who no longer listened, and pressed into the soft flesh of his palm. It stung for a second, but when the blood began to flow, he felt better.

"Raise your hand to mine, here." The samurai placed his palm against the empty air space of where a door would be, and like a street mime, he pressed to the invisible wall.

"What's going to happen?"

"Do as I say."

"Yes master." David pressed his own palm to the place, feeling a slight resistance like a sheet of cellophane. He put his hand in mirror image against his lord and master's palm, holding it in a frozen high-five.

Wind howled in the chamber. Bears roared far away. The stones screamed. David felt dizzy and wobbled on his feet, but he kept his palm pressed to his lord's hand. At all costs, he could not let go.

In a few moments, the maelstrom subsided and all was still. Only now, David was on the inside room and the samurai stood outside.

"Oh crap!" David rushed at the door and smacked against an invisible force as solid as a pane of glass.

The samurai clicked open his gold pocket watch. "The time is twenty-three minutes past nine o'clock in the morning, is that correct?"

"Let me out! God, please, let me out!"

The samurai frowned at him with cold, black beady eyes. "The time, David. What is the time?"

Gasping like a man drowning in the ocean, nevertheless, he had to obey. David checked his digital wristwatch. "It's... it's almost nine twenty-four... now!"

"Very good. And, when is the sunset?"

David pressed a button on his digital watch. The screen illuminated neon green, displaying the compass coordinates and barometric pressure. "Sunset today is at six thirty-seven."

"The ferry takes...?" The lord paused, and David eagerly supplied the answer.

"Three hours and forty-five minutes, give or take, depending on the weather. It's a clear day today. You should make good time."

"And the train?"

"Another thirty or forty-five minutes," David answered. "Plus time to get to the station platform and the trolly and traffic stuff."

"I will need to hurry to return before sunset."

"And if you don't?"

The samurai clicked shut the gold pocket watch and slipped it into his vest's pocket. "If I don't return, I will dissolve into a ghost. Would that please you, David, if I become a faceless cloud of vapors unable to hurt you or anyone?"

_Yes, yes,_ he screamed inside his mind, but what came out of his mouth was equally sincere. "No, my lord, I would grieve if that happened to you."

"Then pray, David, to all the spirits of water and sky, that I will return before the sun sets over the crest of Mount Hachimantai. If I am even one minute late, you will be trapped in that room with no power of heaven and earth to rescue you, and the Bear God of the Ainu will curse your bones."

On the inside looking out, David wondered if that was how his master became stuck in the demon cage in the first place. There must have been a time when he was simply a man, when he had stood in the place where David had been, when he vowed allegiance to a caged master and offered his own blood to set his master free. David imagined a frightened man close to the same age that he was now, standing inside a windowless room and begging his master to return before sunset. It was an appointment that the previous master had failed to keep.

"Hurry, master, hurry!"

##

At lunch time, Barnabas went to the cramped office that he shared with two other professors. Their full-size wooden desks must have been assembled inside the room, like boats in a basement. Crammed in with the wall-bracket bookshelves, army surplus steel filing cabinets, and a little propane stove with a tea kettle constantly simmering, there was very little elbow room. Barnabas did not mind the confining space at all—it felt comforting to be pressed in on all sides by wooden furniture, almost like a coffin.

Professor Kobayashi his office mate was still in lecture. The only other person sharing the room was Professor Ito, a young nervous fellow who smoked too much. His desk had several glass ashtrays, all of them heaping with ashes and crumpled brown-and-white cigarette butts. Barnabas had politely asked that he not smoke when he was in the room, and Professor Ito honored the request, though it put a strain on their relationship. Whenever they shared the space, back to back, going over students' papers, it seemed that Ito was always looking over his shoulder and hoping that Barnabas would leave so he could light up again. An hour was the most he could stand it before he would take a walk outside in the hallways and return ten minutes later, reeking of tobacco. _Why do you do that yourself? _Barnabas often wished he could ask. _Your life is already so short._

Instead of reviewing his notes for the afternoon class, Barnabas spent his lunch hour with a notepad and an exquisite fountain pen, trying to remember and write down the tattoo he had seen on his young cousin's forearm. David had only allowed him a quick glimpse before he covered it up. More than the tattoo itself, Barnabas had recognized the behavior—the desperation to conceal the mark of his master. Though it was not a vampire bite, the influence appeared to be very similar. Barnabas knew it well; he had played the part of the master, summoning a minion from afar to come to his coffin side.

He rubbed his weary eyes, fighting the need to use his reading glasses. He had not slept well the night before. Stray dogs had sensed his mood—one of the few powers he still had left, after the unorthodox medical experiments had worked their cure. The pack had gathered underneath his window to bark and howl for hours. Neighbors shouted and threw rocks at the flea-bitten mongrels, but nothing chased them away until daylight came. As Julia slept on a pallet of futons nearby, Barnabas felt energized by the restless power of the night in a way he had not felt in many years. Some other demon besides him had a grip on the Collins family, and he briefly longed for those days when he could have done something about it.

"Excuse me, Professor Ito?" Barnabas asked, in Japanese.

The fellow startled and looked up from his books. He had large round eyes compared to most, and Barnabas assumed he had some mixture of Ainu heritage, though he would not be so rude as to ask.

"Yes?"

He rolled back the heavy castors of his reclining wooden office chair, coming around a half circle and facing his colleague. It gave him time to compose the syntax of foreign words in his mind before haltingly making his request. As a well educated man of the Jeffersonian era, he could easily converse in Latin, ancient Greek, and French, but the Japanese language was a particularly intricate puzzle.

"Could you help me? I've seen this word. Can you translate it for me, if you would please?" Barnabas showed him the notepaper.

Ito knotted his brows that, somehow, made his eyes seem even larger. There were four kanji characters in a row, the Japanese script borrowed from Chinese and modified in pronunciation and meaning to make it their own. The first two in the set were not difficult to remember or write, nor was the final character: the number three. However, the other kanji was a complex tangle of ink strokes, a stanza of a Mozart concerto compressed into a small, square space.

Ito nodded rapidly, his mullet bangs drooping forward. "I know this." He took up a sharp gel-ink pen and quickly etched out the intricate ink strokes.

"Yes, yes, that's it! Can you translate it?"

"It is a man's name."

Barnabas smiled briefly. _Of course it is_. "Do you recognize who it is?"

"Yes, it is a well known person of history." Ito stood up. He was slender to an anemic degree. In the old days, he would have made easy prey.

Ito went to the bookshelf and pulled down a hardback volume bound in light blue canvas. It was the _Encyclopedia Japonica_, written in English. Ito muttered to himself as he turned the pages, reciting the foreign alphabet under his breath. At last, he came to a page with a three-quarter size black and white photograph.

"Here, this is the name: Hijikata Toshizo."

Barnabas looked at the fellow in the photograph, seated, wearing a frock coat, vest, and trousers of the mid- to late nineteenth century. The chain of a gold pocket watch hooked to the front button. His hair was cut loose to the collar and combed back in Oscar Wilde style, looking very much a dapper European gentleman. Barnabas read aloud the caption, "The demon of the Shinsengumi. Can you tell me more about that?"

"I'm sorry, excuse me." Ito pulled out his packet of cigarettes. "I need..."

"_Dozo_." Barnabas nodded permission for him to leave; far be it for him to deny anyone a craving. Once Ito had gone, Barnabas sat down with the encyclopedia to learn about his adversary.

At the time of Commodore Perry's arrival in Tokyo harbor, Hijikata was not quite the leader but the right-hand man of the Shinsengumi, a group of self-appointed enforcers of the shogun's law. They operated like organized vigilantes with carte blanche to kill in the name of the _bafuku_—the shogun's government. They had strict regulations in their own group, as well, and deserters or traitors were forced to commit suicide by slashing their own stomach, the _hara-kiri_ ceremony otherwise known as _seppuku_. Barnabas murmured to himself the ancient Greek warrior's axiom, "Come back with your shield or on it."

After the country opened to the west in the 1860s, the Shinsengumi refused to disband or surrender, and they became fugitives. The Imperial Army hunted them down with a ruthless vigor not seen since the days when the Pope's Army burned the Knights Templar at the stake. The leader of the Shinsengumi was beheaded, and the rest of them scattered. Only Hijikata remained—fleeing to the far northern island, where he helped set up a insurgency government and made his last stand on a fateful day in 1869 at the pentagram-shaped fort on the northernmost island of Hokkaido.

"Of course," Barnabas whispered under his breath. "The Hakodate fort... the museum... that is where David met him. That must be his resting place."

The accounts told that Hijikata was shot from his horse in the heat of battle, but the whereabouts of his corpse remained unknown. Several memorial stones were set up in the Tokyo area, and a bronze statue stood guard at Takahata Fudo Buddhist temple, but the man had no actual grave. _Perhaps_, Barnabas thought, _he was never buried at all because he never really died._

So engrossed in his reading, Barnabas did not notice the approaching footsteps until they were right at his door. He assumed that Ito had finished his cigarette by now and was returning.

"_Domo_," said a gentle male voice, a stranger.

A student who had led the stranger here said his polite good-byes, nodded a bow, and walked quickly away.

Barnabas got to his feet. He was very aware of being boxed in this tiny office. The clutter of furniture gave him nowhere to move if the stranger should advance in attack.

"You are Professor Collins?" The fellow enunciated his consonants softly, almost sounding Creole, but otherwise his pronunciation of the Rs and Ls was a well practiced perfection.

"Mister Hijikata, I presume."

The fellow's small eyes widened a bit, and that was the only hint of an emotional reaction. Hijikata looked to the desk, where the encyclopedia page lay open to his own photograph. He wore the same brown frock coat and brushed wool vest. Even the gold pocket watch's chain was hooked to the same buttonhole. The only difference was that his hair was fully grown out in a three-foot long ponytail.

"I am so glad you are seeing this," Hijikata said.

"Forgive me if I find that hard to believe." Barnabas slammed the book shut. "You can't possibly be pleased that I have learned your secret."

The fellow's thin mouth tilted in a small, cruel smile. "You are a worthy adversary. I would be disappointed if David failed his task with a stupid man."

Barnabas gripped the edge of the desk. He was eager to demand, _Where is David and what have you done with him!_ But he could not afford to waste the time shouting at a thunderstorm. He saw all too clearly the heartlessness of this man, the remorseless gaze that he himself had so often displayed. If David were alive or dead, at this moment, he was powerless to do anything about it. He put the thought of his young cousin out of his mind to focus on the adversary at hand.

"I understand that you are the so-called investor who wishes to buy my house."

"Yes, I have offered a generous price. Will you reconsider your refusal?"

Barnabas stepped to the side, nearer to Professor Ito's desk. From the corner of his eye, he scanned the objects for anything he could use as a weapon: a stapler, a ballpoint pen, a letter opener, an ashtray, a plastic comb.

"I'd like to, uh, discuss it in more depth. Why do you want to buy Collinwood?"

"It is a charming old house. I have seen photographs of the architecture."

"Yes, it is old, but there are other old houses in America with architecture that is equally impressive. Why this one?"

Hijikata moved in a little closer, now almost within arm's reach. "It is a sentimental feeling. Have you ever simply wanted something and could not explain why?"

Barnabas shook his head, slowly. "That is not a good enough answer. Tell me a compelling reason and I may consider selling."

"I have heard rumors that it is haunted. I am fascinated with ghost stories."

"Oh, are you?" The office was poorly ventilated, stuffy and humid. Barnabas saw little beads of sweat break out on Hijikata's pale forehead between the two horn-like hooks of his neatly styled bangs. So, he was not a ghost himself. A warlock perhaps?

"Do you believe in ghosts, Mister Collins?"

"Yes, I do."

Hijikata gazed off beyond Barnabas to the far wall, to a small square window that shined brightly with afternoon sunlight, that by cruel necessity had to be closed to keep out the mosquitoes. "There are many ghosts in Japan. Many wars have been fought on this soil, over the centuries, and many women and men have died."

Barnabas said meaningfully, "It seems not all of them are at rest in their graves."

Hijikata answered, "It is impossible for a man to rest when his country is losing its way... losing its honor. The Japanese today are corrupted by the foreign barbarians. They only think about money."

Nodding along, surprised at himself for agreeing, Barnabas suggested, "You fantasize about a return to the old ways, the code of honor from the days of the shogun. I understand that you dedicated your life to serving your liege lord, and then one day, it was all ripped out of your hands. Your country opened to the west and, practically overnight, your being a samurai meant nothing."

"My family was not the noble class," Hijikata said. "My father was a farmer. We were not born samurai; we made ourselves into something more. We were the defenders... the guardians... the enforcers of the bushido code. In a way, we were more perfect samurai than those who were born as samurai."

Hijikata stepped a little closer, with a quiet, menacing, stalking way. Barnabas knew the posture very well; he had perfected it. He moved a step backwards but that gave him very little ground. If only he had a sword or a pistol loaded with silver bullets it would be worth trying to see if a warlock or a demon could be wounded.

"Those days are gone," Barnabas told him flatly.

"Not to me. I remember..."

"Yes, yes, I understand. Believe me, I understand very well how tempting it is to preserve a past life when the rest of the world rushes on without you."

Hijikata inclined his head slightly to gaze at Barnabas from an angle. "Yes, I believe you are the only one who can understand my heart. You cherish that house because you were there when it was built. You have affection for the ghosts because you knew them in life."

"How did you learn the house is haunted?"

"Spirits have whispered to me across the ocean's divide. Spirits have promised me that they can take me back to the day I died."

Barnabas nodded knowing full well that Collinwood manor was much more than an ordinary house. There was a stairway that transcended time itself, and rooms that changed into portals to other parallel universes, and objects stored behind secret panels that connected the present to the past. The ghosts were capricious and often cruel, and more than one person associated with the Collins clan had been driven to raving mad.

"The house does have its quirks," Barnabas said. "However, the ghosts are in charge of most of it; I am quite surprised that they've made any sort of promise to you."

"Jonathan Collins himself promised me."

Barnabas took in a breath of surprise. "How do you know him?"

"He came aboard Commodore Perry's ships and he stayed with occupation forces. I knew him in Tokyo when he was smuggling out treasures and gold coins. I know of his many barbaric crimes."

"I don't believe you." Barnabas made a fist, ready to strike the man for speaking dishonorably of an ancestor—or a descendent—it was sometimes confusing and easier to refer to them all as simply cousins.

"It is true! I was with the Shinsengumi patrol in the streets. I caught him in the act of raping a geisha."

"How dare you make such an accusation!"

"I saw him chase her, half naked and bleeding into the street where he started beating her with a cane. I slashed his chest with my sword. I thought I had killed him, but then... He rose to his feet! It was incredible. He was drenched in blood, but there was no wound."

Barnabas shook his head with amazement. Fighting back the urge to challenge him to a duel to defend a cousin's honor, he struggled to listen to the story being told. "I have never heard of such a thing before."

"He laughed at me. He thought me stupid and ignorant. I had so many questions, but he did not speak Japanese and I did not speak English then. I did not need to understand his words; I understood his heart. His blue eyes mocked me. My fury reached a fever as I had never known before that night. I thought, these are the people that my country is opening its arms to? These hairy, smelly, barbarians of the west! I became obsessed with learning his secret, and I did! I stole it from him..."

Barnabas interrupted, "Stole what?" He thought, _It can't be like Quentin's portrait because that's too unique and individualized. An amulet perhaps, like the Egyptian scarab owned by Laura __Collins?_

"Once I had it," Hijikata gloated, "Jonathan Collins ran from me in terror. He requested a transfer on the next ship out, and with his arms full of contraband treasures stolen from samurai lords, he returned to his home... in Collinwood."

Barnabas finished the story, "Where he lived until 1878 when he committed suicide by shooting himself."

"No," said Hijikata. "His spirit told me it was an accident. His young cousin Quentin was playing with a gun.

"I can't believe it!" Barnabas thought, _I must telephone Quentin at once! _"However, I still don't understand why Jonathan's spirit promised you anything to do with the house."

"We have made a bargain," Hijikata said, while glancing aside to the flat clock on the wall. "Jonathan wishes to borrow – it – what I stole from him, the power to survive any injury. He wants to borrow it for that one afternoon when a child is playing with a gun."

"I see."

"In return, he will bring the blueprints and journals here, to me, and with his many skills he will help me construct another Stairway into Time… perhaps a better one than the first one. He will make a passageway for me to go back to the day when my life ended. David will help me smuggle guns into this weak-hearted country... twentieth century automatic rifles, grenades and missiles. I will take them with me, and the final battle at Goryōkaku will go very differently."

Barnabas coughed out a bitter laugh to imagine young David Collins as an arms smuggler. His laughter also came from a wash of relief, that as long as Hijikata needed his faithful lackey to perform services, his cousin would not be harmed.

"I'm sorry to tell you this," Barnabas said. "But it's impossible to roll back time and recreate the past as you would like it to be. I've tried to change history myself, on several occasions, and I've only managed to make matters worse by my meddling."

"I am not you. I will not make mistakes." He took out his pocket watch, and gazed at the time, comparing the intricately styled brass watch hands to the clock on the wall.

Barnabas noticed his preoccupation, and though he knew Hijikata was not a vampire, still he seemed to be concerned with the progress of the hours. He knew the feeling all too well, in those days when his existence was defined by the sun's rising and sun's setting.

"I still don't understand why you need to own the house, if you and Jonathan have already made your bargain?"

Hijikata smirked. "I thought you were an intelligent man. You do not know this simple thing?"

"It is a wise man who admits that he knows nothing."

Once more, Hijikata checked his pocket watch. "I will ask you, now, one last time. Will you sign the paper so that the house can be sold to me?"

"No I will not, never."

"Then you must die," said the demon.

Barnabas sneered at him, "What purpose would that serve you? If you wanted to kill us off, you could have done that months ago. Why go to all the trouble of asking me to sign a legal paper?"

"Because it is easier that way. Fewer questions are asked. But if there are no living heirs, the property goes into..." The demon paused like a student giving an oral report who, for a moment, had forgotten what he was meant to say. "...it is called probate, and the State of Maine will put it up for sale at public auction. In the end, I will have ownership to Collinwood, whether you agree to the deal or not."

Hijikata slipped his right hand inside his frock coat and reached to his belt line. Barnabas knew that gesture; he had not seen it for 200 years, the very specific unmistakable movement of a man reaching for a hidden dagger. His wolf's head cane was in the umbrella stand by the door—too far away.

He grabbed for the next best thing: Professor Ito's heavy glass ashtray. At the same time that Hijikata pulled the knife and went for his throat. Barnabas swung the ashtray and clonked him on the head. Ashes and cigarette butts sprinkled out in a cloud of dusty gray flakes. Hijikata staggered back, a bloody gash at the temple leaking a trickle of red blood down his pale cheek.

Then Barnabas used the encyclopedia to smack the knife out of Hijikata's hand. The blade dropped dully to the carpet. Barnabas stepped on it.

He braced himself for Hijikata to come at him again. The fellow was youthful, about thirty years old, in prime physical condition and a trained hand to hand fighter. Since the cure, his vampire strength had diminished and briefly he worried if he would be able to fight. Still, he had to try. He could not surrender; a Collins never surrendered.

The wall clock clicked to half past one o'clock. Outside, pre-recorded Big Ben chimes on a loudspeaker rang the half hour.

Hijikata looked up to the clock, and his eyes widened with as close to panic as the implacable face could dare to show.

"We will meet again." He backed out the office door, still on guard, ready for a fight if Barnabas should advance on him.

"I look forward to it!"

"No, you don't. You will regret opposing me, Mr. Collins. You will suffer the consequences! Before the dawn comes tomorrow, you will beg to sell that house to me!"

When Hijikata left the room, Barnabas rushed after him. He grabbed his wolf's head cane and started off at a run. But the younger man was too fit, and descended the stairs as smoothly as water trickling down a fountain. Barnabas was ashamed that his lungs soon turned to glass splinters, and by the time he huffed and puffed his way to the main door, Hijikata was long gone.

##

Barnabas dabbed his head with a kerchief as he sat down at his desk. _What a fool I am to challenge him! I've put David, and the whole of history, in mortal danger. _After a few minutes, his breathing returned to normal. How much easier things used to be when he could turn into a bat and swoop onto his unsuspecting prey.

He checked in his leather-bound address book for a phone number, and meticulously poked all the right buttons to place an international call. The jarring bell tone rang, and rang, and rang almost ten times before someone picked up.

A sleepy male voice grunted, "What?"

"Quentin? It's Barnabas."

"What the hell? It's... it's the middle of the night... Some of us sleep, y'know."

"I apologize for waking you, but it's terribly urgent."

Quentin groaned and there was the sound of bed sheets and mattress springs shifting about. Then, in the background, a woman's voice murmured sleepily, "What is it?"

"Go back to sleep, babe," Quentin said to his female companion, whoever she might be. "I'll take it down to the kitchen. Barnabas? You there?"

"Yes."

"Hold on, I'm going downstairs to pick up the extension."

Barnabas drummed his fingers on the desk. He waited, listening to vague shuffling sounds, as the clock on the wall ticked down a minute, then two. On his desk was the lunch he had not eaten: a hard-boiled egg and a rice ball wrapped in papery seaweed. Julia kept insisting that he try to eat more human food, but he'd found nothing yet tasted quite right. Even the raw fish in sushi was thoroughly washed and drained of its blood.

The struggle with Hijikata had left his mouth dry, and as he licked his lips he felt a little protrusion of fang. A blush warmed his cheeks; that had not happened in a long time. Frowning into the silent receiver of the phone, he put a thumb in his mouth and gently pressed the sharp points back in place.

"Okay, Barnabas," said Quentin's voice on the line, sounding surprisingly close by. The telephone—he still had not quite gotten used to its resemblance to magic. "Where's the fire?"

"David has fallen under the influence of a demon master, or perhaps a warlock."

"Oh great. Where is he?"

"Here in Japan, with me."

"You're in Japan? I thought you were in Bombay."

"That was February," he said impatiently. "I'm in Japan now, teaching a semester at the university, but that's not relevant. Coincidentally, David is working as an archaeologist at the Hakodate museum and, apparently, he's involved with some sort of resurrected immortal figure from Japanese history."

"Uh-huh, well, I'm in Chicago right now. What the hell do you think I can do about it?"

"This demon is the so-called investor who plans to buy Collinwood."

"Oh man," Quentin said.

Barnabas scowled and his voice sank into a deeper bass range, almost a growl. "David tells me that you signed the waiver agreeing to the sale and relinquishing all rights of inheritance to the property."

"He said it was twenty million dollars..."

"...of the shogun's gold," Barnabas finished. "Have you lost your mind, Quentin? You know damned well, sir, that house is not simply four walls and a roof."

"Well, sorry," Quentin said. "I didn't think…"

"Of course you didn't think. When do you ever _think_?"

"If you're just going to insult me, I'm going to hang up and let you deal with this yourself."

Barnabas leaned into the phone, reaching out with his hand, even though he knew that the other man could not see him. "Wait, wait, I apologize. Quentin, don't hang up. I need you to answer some questions."

"All right. Mind if I fire up Mister Coffee while we're talking?"

"Be my guest." Barnabas settled back in his office chair. "First, do you have any notion as to why the demon would need to hold legal title to the property?"

"I think so." In the background, tap water rushed into a glass pot. "If I was constructing a binding spell on a place of power, that would be my first step."

"I see, so if Hijikata owns the house, then he will be the master of the spirits who haunt it."

"Master depends on his skills and power level, but at the very least, he'll be able to summon them and manipulate them. Damnit all, we could be neck deep in zombies by summer." In the pause, Barnabas heard the gritty sounds of coffee being scooped into a paper filter. "So, uh, Hijikata… Is that the demon's name?"

"Yes. Why?"

"If we know a demon's name, I can maybe try and put together a counter-spell to contain him. But you have to be sure that's his real, true name and not a pseudonym."

"It was in the encyclopedia."

Quentin laughed, a mocking yet charming cackle fitting for an immortal warlock who was also a werewolf. "Oh Barney, you are so delightful sometimes!"

"Don't call me 'Barney.'"

"Okay, sure." Quentin snickered a few more times before he caught his breath. "I really doubt that a demon is going to allow his real name to be printed in the encyclopedia. I'm sorry, but that's not an option. What else do you know about him?"

"He seemed concerned about the hour, as if he had somewhere he needed to be before sunset."

"His lair, most likely," Quentin said. "Wouldn't it be interesting if he were the opposite of a vampire, that he could only walk about in the hours of daylight?"

Barnabas nodded. "It is the land of the rising sun, after all."

"What's his hold on David?"

"He tattooed his name on David's arm."

"Whoa, that's a tough one."

"I thought you just said that this scoundrel's publicly known name has no power."

Quentin sighed like a teacher grading papers. "It's not what's written on his arm, it's the act of the tattoo itself. Short of burning it off, I'm not sure what you can do to break that."

_Burning it off... _he mused used a moment in silence.

Through the telephone, he heard Quentin's coffee gurgling into a mug, and then listened to the man take a slurping first sip.

Barnabas said, "There is one more thing I need to ask you, and I'll warn you, it may be an uncomfortable subject."

"Okay."

"What do you know of Jonathan Collins?"

The coffee mug smashed to the floor, and hot coffee sizzled on the cold linoleum.

"Quentin, are you all right?"

"Look, Barnabas, I'm dead tired. It's the middle of the night. I don't want to talk anymore."

"I need you to answer me, Quentin. Do you know anything of your uncle's powers of invincibility?"

"What the hell are you talking about? He wasn't invincible! He committed suicide."

Barnabas closed his eyes, and despite the urgency of the hour, forced himself to speak more gently into the phone. Only a hundred years had passed since the accident; Quentin no doubt still felt sore about it.

"I'm sorry, Quentin, but the demon told me the truth of what happened that day. He said, when your uncle was stationed here in Japan, that they had an altercation and he stole some sort of secret object from Jonathan. Now this object is the crux of the bargain between Jonathan's ghost and this demon. In return for the ghost's help to construct a second Stairway Into Time and be transported into the past to have a second chance to change his own history, he'll lend to Jonathan the power to be invincible just for that one day—that one day, when _you_ accidentally shot him."

"Oh my god."

"Is it true?"

Quentin was silent for a moment, and Barnabas imagined the mist of grief clouding the man's icy blue eyes. "No one ever knew! I was playing Custer and Sitting Bull, and I didn't think the Smith 'n Wesson was loaded. It just went off, and Uncle Jonathan fell over. I dropped the gun. People rushed into the room and they thought that he'd shot himself with me right there. It took him nine hours to bleed to death. They all felt sorry for me witnessing such a terrible thing. I could never bring myself to confess the truth. It was at that moment I decided to start studying black magic; I never wanted to feel that powerless again."

"I understand, but that's not important right now. Think back, Quentin. Think! Did cousin Jonathan ever give you a hint of what amulet he might have had that was stolen from him?"

"No, I have no idea. You might not be able to imagine this, but I was just a little kid once."

"I know," Barnabas said gently, in the same soothing tone that he liked to use with David.

"Listen, do you need help? I can try and get on the next plane..."

"There isn't time. It's already two o'clock in the afternoon here. Airplanes and trains are faster than clipper ships, but they aren't yet fast enough to bring you to the other side of the globe in under sixteen hours. He's threatened dire consequences by dawn."

"I can try," Quentin said.

"All right, cousin, you can try. I appreciate your concern very much." Barnabas hung up the phone and paused with his hand resting on the receiver. For the first time in many years, he dreaded the coming of dawn.

##

Barnabas next telephoned Julia and then canceled his afternoon classes, in that order. He left campus and walked twenty minutes to meet her at the train station.

On the platform, as the wind of passing trains stirred the flaps of his overcoat, he asked, "Did you bring everything as I instructed?"

"Yes, but..." She fluttered her eyes. "Barnabas I wish you'd reconsider."

"How can I? Who else has a chance of stopping him?"

Julia boarded the train with him, and together—with the bulky satchel clutched between them—they sat on a green vinyl bench. The diesel engine pulled out of the station and worked itself up to a steady chugging rhythm. The two stared straight ahead at the opposite window, at the majestic scenery of open meadow lands and white-capped mountains streaking by.

"You're not..." she began.

"Don't say it," he interrupted. He knew what she meant to say: he was not young anymore, he was not agile or strong; he was not fully a vampire.

"Can't... _anyone_ help?" Julia asked, half stammering, the words coming out of her mouth with effort. "Did you phone Quentin?"

"He's getting on a flight, now, but I don't think there's time."

"Time," Julia murmured as she leaned sideways and rested her head on his shoulder.

Barnabas looking straight ahead saw their reflections in the window glass, faint and indistinct with the afternoon sun still bright on the landscape beyond. _What a pair we are_. Julia's hair was cotton white, and he was starting to go gray as well. Ironic, that for so long they had worked and suffered and sacrificed to achieve this miracle—the ability to travel outside in the daylight hours, to exist without craving violence and blood, to be human. Now the very thing he had abhorred in himself for two centuries was the very thing he needed the most to save his young cousin's life.

The ferry boat ride across the Tsugaru Strait took him back to the far-off days in the colonial era when he really had been human. As a youth in the company of his father and his uncle, he had traveled the world on three-masted wooden ships with tall white sails. He had been to Spain and Portugal, to pre-revolutionary France and Bavaria, to the Ivory Coast of Africa, and to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean where he would meet and briefly love the witch who would curse him to eternity.

He half-closed his eyes to inhale the scent of the sea. He always felt at home on deep water or near the ocean's shore. Waves churning under the prow sounded like a woman moaning in pleasure, or a woman dying as a vampire sucked the last mouthful of blood out of her jugular.

He opened his eyes to view the colors of the afternoon sun. Sea water turned to copper gold, then blood-black, and finally the sun sank into the waters and was lost to view.

"It's dark," he said to Julia, standing by his side at the railing. "We won't reach Hakodate port for another two-and-a-half hours. He caught the earlier ferry. He must be safely in his lair by now."

She asked, "How will you find him?"

"I'll retrace David's steps at the museum. We'll see if he has an office or a work space there where he might have made notes."

"He wouldn't..." Julia closed her eyes and clutched the front panel of her overcoat. Although she had taken a handful of pills, she still looked a bit seasick. "...wouldn't be that careless... to leave evidence."

"It's our only hope." Barnabas put his arm around Julia and held her securely. It surprised him to feel how thin she was underneath the bulky layers of coat and cardigan. "When we land, I want you to stay behind in the ferry building."

"But you... you need me!"

"I can't rescue David and protect you at the same time. Please, Julia, if you really want to help me, you'll stay where I know you'll be safe." He caressed her face with his fingertips and lightly stirred her short white curls. He cupped his hand behind her neck just under the ear, where he could feel her carotid artery pulse against his palm.

She gazed up at him adoringly with that sort of unconditional devotion that he had only seen before in victims of his bite. The love that radiated out of her only confused him, now more than ever. Julia had always known what sort of creature he was from the first time they met; there had never been any illusions between them. Julia had witnessed him sucking blood from the necks of pretty young ladies and killing without remorse. He had surrendered to her promise that he could be a human once again. _I should love her_, he scolded himself, as if he were a third person standing behind them at the ferry's railing. _She deserves someone to love her. How can I be sure if it should be me?_

##

David turned once more to the stairs. He took a few shuffling steps before his lord and master called out, "Stop."

"Let me help you, master." David stood in the cold stone room, naked and shivering.

Hijikata was once more inside the furnished room. His back was turned to the door, as he rummaged through the elegant flat drawers of his bureau and armoire, pawing into the piles of neatly folded silks and linens, looking for something that he had not yet found. Every so often, he glanced over his shoulder to be sure that David had not wandered off.

"I can... I can kill him for you, if that's what you want? Let him rescue me. I won't betray your hiding place! He trusts me. He'll let down his guard for me. I'll wait for him to fall asleep, and I'll... I'll drive a wooden stake through his heart. Is that what you'd like me to do, master?"

"Ah... _atta_." Hijikata brought forth a flowing swatch of satiny white silk. "Spread this on the floor."

David caught the fluttering, billowing swathes and dutifully shook it open to spread on the floor. He looked wistfully into the room at his own clothes discarded in a sloppy heap inside the door—out of reach.

"Now, put this on." Hijikata tossed him a folded kimono of the purest bleached white cloth that David had ever seen. It was like the robe of an angel, its sleeves in elongated rectangles, its collar starched to a crisp.

"I'll kill them all," David offered. "Let me go home to Maine, and I'll kill them all for you: my father, my aunt, my cousins... I'll find them sleeping in their beds and I'll quietly slit their throats one by one. Would that please you, master?"

Hijikata knelt to survey half a dozen long daggers arrayed on a bright red cloth. "Always your murder plan involves attacking while your victims sleep? Have you never killed a man who is awake and standing before you?"

"I've never killed anyone before."

"Mmmm," Hijikata purred with satisfaction as he finally selected one blade, its pearly handle intricately wrapped in a blue and black braided cord. "Yet you offer to murder your entire family?"

"I would do it for you, lord and master. I would do anything for you."

"Yes-s-s-s," Hijikata said, drawing out the S with a serpentine hiss. "You will."

David wrapped the white kimono around himself like a bathrobe. As he had been taught by his museum colleagues at the New Year's party, he made sure to tuck in the right-hand panel first and cross the left-hand panel on top. He was almost ready to tie the belt sash, when Hijikata frowned disapproval.

"No, David, the other way. Right on top of left."

"But Sato-san told me it's the same for men and women, always left over right. Was he wrong?"

Hijikata's thin mouth twitched at the corner. "No, he was not wrong. I am telling you, now, to wear the kimono in the way that we dress a corpse for burial."

"Yes master." David opened the robe and, with trembling hands, he once more wrapped it around himself in the opposite way.

"First, you must go up the stairs and open the panel..." Hijikata pinched his thumb and forefinger close together. "...this much. Then, immediately come back down here."

"But if I do that, someone might see it and find your hiding place!"

"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, they will. Hurry, David. He is coming."

##

The museum was closed and locked. The windows were all dark. The parking lot was empty, and all the tourists had gone back to their hotels. _More provincial than Collinsport_, he thought, _that rolls up their sidewalks at nine o'clock._

He used a rock to break a window and first heaved through his satchel. Then, feeling quite undignified, he crawled over the sill and stepped into shards of broken glass. He paused to brush straight the half-circle cape flaps of his Inverness coat.

Not being able to see in the dark was another failing of his weaker, human eyes. Grunting with annoyance at himself, he picked out a steel flashlight from the satchel and switched it on. The amber beam cut through the floating bits of dust and cast a wandering spot on the display cabinets. He walked quickly through the main hall, ignoring the displays of samurai and footmen costumes and the mundane clutter of everyday life: rice pots, iron tea kettles, broken bowls, and hand-dipped candles.

At the rear stairwell, he had a choice of going upstairs to the curator's office, or downstairs into a deep shadowy unknown. Barnabas did not even stop to hesitate; he went down.

His Oxford shoes tapped lightly on the boards. The darkness was disturbed by his intrusion. He switched off the flashlight and paused at the base of the stairs to listen to the nothingness, to attune what was left of his nighttime senses to the pure black shades of an underground room.

Barnabas felt something brush by behind him. A chill shivered down his neck. He turned around a slow circle, turning and turning, but could not sense a physical presence. The air changed from the warm humidity of springtime into a crisp snap of late autumn in Maine, almost cold enough to snow.

The odor guided him forth, and because it was not human—nor had it ever been human—he trusted it to lead him. It was animal musk, larger than a wolf. So many years had passed since he had hunted with a flintlock musket in the woods of New England that it took him a moment to name it.

Bear.

He walked through the uncatalogued clutter of one room, into another, into another, and by the time he reached the final chamber his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light. Colors no longer existed. The shapes of shelves and tables and boxes of artifacts were faintly outlined in gray. Here the old things were stored, the things that modern Japanese and enthusiastic young archaeologists had no names for, had no idea of the purpose for, and they could only puzzle over the lost knowledge of a lost people and wonder at the artistry from days gone by.

The bear stood on its hind feet and was as tall as a man. Barnabas looked straight into its amber eyes. They understood each other: the predator who prowled by night; the predator who slept helplessly in his den.

Barnabas inhaled deeply the musk of the bear. He could feel the substance of its fur, sense its blood-thirsty fleas, in every way a solid animal with breath and body, and yet he knew it was not really here at all. _Perhaps_, he thought. _Neither am I._

The bear opened its arms, inviting an embrace. Barnabas walked forward willingly into the clutch of its thick furry arms. He pressed himself against the animal, chest to chest, bringing his face ever closer to that thick shaggy neck. The bear softly growled and in hearing that animal voice resonating, vibrating by direct contact from the bear's chest into his own chest, Barnabas knew that it was a female.

Eyes closed, he smiled as he felt the fangs elongate out of his upper jaw. He opened his mouth as wide as he could—wider than he ever had before. Exhaling a gasp of glee, he chomped.

##

Barnabas easily found the panel, unlatched, slid it aside and descended the shallow steps. He left the darkness of the upper rooms behind, a bit sad that he could not linger there for more time. He savored the aftertaste of bear's blood in his mouth and throat. The blood filled not only his belly but his arteries and veins, filling every part of his limbs with a fluid strength he had not known in years.

Candles lit the scene. He took it all in with a keen glance.

David knelt on a white sheet spread on the floor, facing the doorway of an interior room. He wore a bleached white kimono, and the only color about him was his maple blond hair. He gripped a very large dagger, the blade's tip pointed to his belly, and a leaf of paper wrapped around its handle. Barnabas was briefly curious about the paper wrapping, but then realized that when the blood started to gush, David should not be allowed to lose his grip on the dagger's handle. He would be required to keep digging into himself, to disembowel himself, to scoop out his own guts like an Atlantic salmon on the kitchen's cutting board.

"I knew you would come," said Hijikata in a soft steady voice from inside the room. He sat on an upright chair, facing the doorway and observing David who knelt before him.

Hijikata had trimmed away his long ponytail and his shorn locks hung no longer than his collar. He had dressed in David's clothes—simple and unassuming—a buttoned cotton shirt and pleated khaki cargo pants. He wore David's digital wristwatch and yet still carried the gold pocket watch weighing down the little square in the breast of the shirt.

"Are you all right, David?"

The young man's eyes seemed to be closed. Actually he was staring down at the knife blade in his hands, the tip that pointed to his stomach.

"I want to please him so much, cousin Barnabas. Do you think this will please him?" His voice had a tinge of strained agony, that despite his words, he seemed to be crying out, _Help me, help me!_

Barnabas looked inside the room to the cold, remorseless gaze of the samurai. "Yes, David, I think it will."

"Master, I'm ready to begin. May I?"

"Wait!" Barnabas blasted. "What purpose does it serve to kill him? Is he not of more use to you alive, than dead?"

"It will please me to see his blood spill. It will please me more to watch _you_ see his blood spill."

Barnabas reached into the satchel and pulled out a handgun. He aimed the barrel of a .45 Colt revolver straight at the samurai's chest. From barely eight feet away, he could not miss.

Hijikata smiled cruelly. "That will not hurt me."

"I know," he said. "As long as you're wearing my cousin Jonathan's pocket watch, you can't be killed by bullets or swords. You led the charge on horseback, unafraid, because you knew that if you were shot out of your saddle you would not die. You had planned to continue the war and go on fighting to resist the change into the modern world. How sad that you became stuck in there, as the rest of your army surrendered without you."

Hijikata picked up the watch out of his shirt pocket. He let it dangle from his left hand, the chain wrapped and threaded through his fingers like a tangle of cat's cradle. "You cannot take it from me. No one may cross this doorway in the nighttime."

"Yes, I know." Barnabas slowly sank to one knee, a sort of irreverent genuflect. He carefully placed the satchel on the ground near David. He kept the gun pointed at Hijikata and hoped that it was distraction enough.

The long flowing layers of his Inverness coat concealed the movements of his left hand. He reached inside the open satchel. He flicked the stainless steel lighter borrowed from Professor Ito's desk. He lit the fuse.

"When David spills his blood," Hijikata explained calmly. "Whoever steps into it will receive my mark upon him. The mark is more powerful than your vampire curse. You will serve me, Barnabas Collins, with all your heart and soul."

"It has been speculated on more than one occasion whether I have either one of those things." Barnabas stepped away from the satchel. The sparkling fuse was concealed within the dark of its leather case.

At most, he had thirty seconds. But his body's movements did not betray the urgency. He put himself in between David and his master, aiming his gun point blank at the man's chest.

Hijikata smiled broadly now and his eyes narrowed to small slits. "Your only hope is to run, as long as I am here—in the prison of the Ainu shaman—and you are out there."

"Mmmm, yes." Barnabas ventured closer, a little closer, and then he stepped over the threshold. He felt a shiver of warmth and a high-pitched ringing in his ears, and soon it passed.

He was inside.

Hijikata jumped out of his chair. Barnabas fired the gun. It blasted a bloody hole in Hijikata's gut. He fell backwards and landed in a pile of purple and green _zabuton_ cushions.

The bomb in the satchel went off. It erupted in a fireball, fueled by a mini-propane tank that had been useful heating the spigot of the bathtub in his rental house, and a bottle of sake strapped to it with duct tape for good measure. Julie had no experience in bomb making, but Barnabas had told her on the telephone what to do.

The fireball engulfed David Collins, eating up his white kimono and turning it to sprinkles of ash blowing upwards. Flames ate into the young man too. He screamed briefly before he had no throat left to scream with. His entire body shriveled and crumpled like a roll of newspaper. In a few violent blasting seconds, he was all gone. The fire coughed, sank, spattered, and dissolved into curls of smoke. There was nothing left but a shovel-full of dusty ash.

Barnabas reached across the threshold, grabbed the edge of the white sheet, and dragged it inside the room. "Forgive me, cousin," he whispered to the pile of ashes.

While his back was turned, Hijikata stood up quickly bringing with a full-length samurai sword from underneath the cushions. Barnabas was already on his knees next to the sheet full of ashes. He was in the classic position of a man waiting to be decapitated.

"Throw aside the gun."

Barnabas set the .45 down at the edge of ash pile.

"You are a madman! You killed your own cousin, the one who you came to save?"

"I saved him from you. And, by preventing his blood from being spilled, I saved myself. No one else will fall prey to your influence."

Hijikata toyed with bringing the blade close to Barnabas's neck, so close that the hackles stood up in his skin.

"David has told me that the one way to kill a vampire is to drive a wooden stake through its heart. Is that true?"

"Yes." Barnabas shifted around out from beneath the dangling Sword of Damocles where he crouched, moving his weight to the other ankle. He drew Hijikata's attention away from the pile of ashes and forced the focus entirely on him.

"Can a vampire also be killed by chopping off its head?"

"I've read that, in Romania, they do both."

Hijikata shook his head clear, like a man emerging from a swimming pond. He actually laughed. "You are a worthy adversary! Tell me, how did you cross inside?"

"Why should I tell you anything if you're going to destroy me?"

Hijikata lowered the angle of his blade, but only slightly. It was a clear signal that Barnabas was no longer in immediate danger, but if he took one step towards the doorway it would be his last.

"I will allow you to live if you tell me your secret."

"I had a..." Barnabas paused to think of the proper word, as he warily eyed the gleaming blade in Hijikata's hands. "... an encounter with the Bear spirit whom the original Ainu shaman had invoked when constructing this demon cage. The Bear explained to me the rules of this enclosure. Surely you know them as well."

Hijikata recited, slowly, in English, "By day, a living thing may take my place. By night, no living thing can pass through the door."

"Yes, exactly. It's so superbly simple." Barnabas clasped his hands in front of himself. "You see, I am not alive."

"Ahh." Hijikata hissed inward through his teeth, frowning now as the understanding took hold of him. He turned and walked away towards the door. Barnabas, like a valet escorting his gentleman master, walked alongside him.

"I'm prepared to offer you a bargain, Mister Hijikata. If you abandon your interest in my family home, I will ally myself with you of my own free will."

Barnabas glanced over his shoulder to the pile of ashes that was now behind them both. Something stirred.

"I cannot agree to that bargain. Your family is very interesting to me."

"That's a shame because, believe it or not, I feel sorry for you. This afternoon, you told me that I am the only person in the world who can understand your heart. That is exactly true, for I have been a lonely desperate lost soul just as you are now."

Barnabas heard a soft shifting in the dust and white silk. He glanced back again from the corner of his eye, and saw a figure slowly begin to take form. The cinders' powder was being scooped together by the invisible hands of a pastry chef, molded and pressed into arms... legs... and a torso. He raised the volume of his voice to mask the whispery sounds rising out of the ashes.

"When I was first made a vampire, against my will, I went on a murderous rampage. I killed without mercy to drink the blood of harlots and sailors at the seaside docks. I terrorized my own family, causing insanity and suicide to the gentle hearts that, in life, I would have died to protect. My mother poisoned herself. My aunt's heart stopped in fright. My little sister Sarah perished in a storm while running away from my lair in the cemetery. My lover Josette fled from my fangs in terror and threw herself off Widow's Hill into the jagged rocks of the sea."

A human form arose out of the ashes, a dust-caked nude male who rose up to sitting. He brushed the gray powder out of his pale brown hair. He tilted his head sideways to shake cinders from his ears.

"All the while as I destroyed my family and devoured strangers, my father protected me." Barnabas paused to be sure of the attention of his audience, not only the lone samurai staring out the door where he could not pass. David Collins, fresh and clean, wiped his bewildered eyes to find himself sitting nude in a dusty charcoaled sheet.

"My father Joshua Collins was not a sentimental man," Barnabas said. "He was stern and uncompromising. He spanked me with a wooden paddle. He beat the servants with his cane. He probably abused my mother, but we didn't have a word for that sort of thing back then. He was my father, and I wanted to love him, even if loving him meant a slap in the face."

David looked up at him, conscious now and listening. Barnabas glanced back to be sure that the tattoo had now burned away from his skin; David's forearm was clear and bare.

"I remember the transformation so clearly: being on my deathbed, in the throes of fever after the witch sent the vampire bat to bite me. My father came to stand over me, and I think there was a tear in his eye. I said to him, 'I didn't think you would come,' and there was such an expression of grief on his face that I had never seen before. But I would see it again, on another night..." Barnabas gazed off to the wall, to an exquisite gold-leafed tapestry of white cranes soaring over a steep waterfall. "When I arose from my coffin as usual, ready for another night of prowling for victims to feed upon, and he stood there watching me. We looked at each other, father and son. I could have killed him, but I didn't. He could have destroyed me on any number of mornings, but he didn't. We spared each others' lives, such as they were. He bore my terrible secret to the end of his days. And I..."

Barnabas turned sideways to face the left-cheek profile of the samurai. From the corner of his eye, he clearly watched David Collins picked up the Colt revolver that lay on the sheet beside him. His hands still with a light sprinkling of ash found the grip, the trigger, and with his thumb slowly cocked back the hammer.

"I begged him for mercy. I instructed him on how to destroy me, but he did not have the heart. Even after witnessing the terrible murders I had done, he still loved me as his son. By my father's order, I was chained inside my coffin. There I remained until the 1960s when a grave robber broke into my tomb and unwittingly released me. Think of it, trapped alive in a dark box for almost two hundred years… alone and _hungry_. At the end of that hell, my only reward was to stumble into a confusing modern world."

"You understand my heart, trapped in this room."

"Yes, I understand you, Hijikata. I understand your heart very well, and that is why... I'm sorry, but I can't pardon you."

Barnabas grabbed the pocket watch in Hijikata's left hand. With a supreme yank of blood-renewed vampire strength, he tore the chain out of his grasp.

Hijikata started to raise his sword and rotate on his feet. He never got the chance to bring it down.

David fired the gun. The bullet blasted into Hijikata's skull from the side. Blood splashed a bucket load against the wall. Hijikata collapsed and fell. David kept firing the gun, bang-bang-bang, every bullet finding its target in the slender torso. The corpse took it, convulsing as he absorbed each shot.

"You can stop now." Barnabas bent over him and gently pried the gun out of David's shaking hands. He raised the edge of the sheet and draped it around the young man's shoulders. "Are you all right?"

"What the hell!"

"I'm sorry I had to do that to you, but look..." Barnabas picked up David's left arm and showed him that the tattoo was gone.

David blinked his caramel colored eyes and looked up at the older man bending over him. "You... You set me on fire!"

"Yes, and I was confident you would survive."

"What? How?"

"It's in your bloodline. Roger's grandmother was not human, did you know?" Barnabas took hold of the young man's elbow to help him arise.

"Wha-... What? What the hell are you talking about? Not human?" David rose shakily to his feet and modestly clutched the sheet around his loins.

"Laura Collins is a mythological creature known as a Phoenix—a fire bird in human form—and as such she cannot be killed by flames. In fact, she thrives on them. She is virtually immortal and has been alive for many more centuries than I have. She was married to Edward Collins in the 1880s and bore a son Jamison your grandfather. She returned again to Collinwood in the 1950s and married Roger."

"Are you saying…?" Clutching the sheet around himself, David wobbled on his feet. He panted heavily like a man in a fever, or like a man who had just re-grown his lungs. "My mother… is my great-grandmother too?"

Barnabas picked up the gun from the floor. "Yes, you've inherited the trait of the Phoenix from the bloodline of both your mother and father. That makes you a very special person."

"Special?"

"You were reduced to cinders in under fifteen seconds, and now here you are."

"So that wasn't a childish nightmare either? The day I watched my mother die, the whole room went up in flames. She stood there burning and she was happy. I was screaming, and she called to me, 'don't be afraid.' She said she loved me. She wanted me to join her in the fire. She promised that we would live forever."

"You understand, now, she wasn't insane." Barnabas watched the young man's eyes frown and glaze over. Briefly he worried that his cousin might not be able to endure so many revelations so soon; but then, he was a Collins, and had no such luxury to avoid his destiny. "She's an immortal."

As David blinked, little flakes of cinders sprinkled away from his eyelashes. "Are you saying that my mother might still be alive out there in the world somewhere?"

"I don't doubt it for a moment."

David's lower jaw trembled. "Why won't she contact me?"

He patted the young man's shoulder in a fatherly way. "One would hope that she meant what she said, that she really does love you. Sometimes the truest way we can prove our love is by staying away from those whom we might destroy with our embrace."

David coughed gray dust, snorted, and wiped his tears with the corner of the sheet. "In a crazy way, that makes total sense. For the first time in my life, I feel like I truly understand why I'm so weird. Thank you, cousin Barnabas."

"You're most welcome."

The young man glanced to the bloody corpse on the floor, then quickly turned away. "Is he dead? Really?"

"Yes, he is." Barnabas held up the pocket watch admiringly, watching the gleam of candlelight in the filigree gold.

"I shot him."

"Yes, you did, and a very good job you did of it too." Barnabas walked over to the bureau of drawers. He placed the pocket watch on top of the cabinet, and then hooked both thumbs in the ornate iron rings. "Let's find you something to wear, shall we? I believe you and he were about the same shirt size."

David came slowly to stand beside him, and together they stood side by side in front of a mirror. The young man was a clear image, but Barnabas's reflection was a hazy blur of shadowy fog like someone seen through a rainy window in the night. Somehow, the older man's hair was a shade darker, a bit thicker. The wrinkles that had pinched his eyelids and puckered his cheeks seemed a bit smoother than before.

"Oh my god, you were talking... The things you were saying..."

"They're things that I've wanted to share with you for a long time. Some of those secrets, I've never told to anyone... not even Julia." He lifted out a European style shirt in the fashion of the last century. He also produced a pair of Japanese style farmer trousers of indigo blue patterned with white spots.

"You _are_ a vampire," David whispered. "You really are the first, original Barnabas Collins from two hundred years ago. I knew it! You lied to me, my whole life. All my nightmares were true."

"Put these on," Barnabas instructed. "We'll go back to the ferry building and find Julia waiting for us."

"Doctor Hoffman, of course! A brilliant micro-biologist, huh? Experimental research into rare blood diseases, huh? Oh my god, she... she... What did she do to you?"

Barnabas slid the bureau drawer shut. "We'll go to your apartment in town. A hot meal, a very hot bath, a good night's sleep, and you'll feel much better in the morning."

"I'm a monster," David muttered as he let the sheet drop and he stepped into the indigo trousers. "You're a monster. My mother was a monster. Our whole family is monsters living in a haunted house."

Barnabas clapped him on the back. "Now, let's not get carried away with self-pity. Everything's going to be fine."

"How can you say that?"

"Because, David, I've been through much worse and everything has turned out..." Barnabas stopped short, unsure now what word to put in the blank. "…well, it's turned out."

He reached for the pocket watch that he had placed on top of the bureau. David was closer and faster; he grabbed it first.

Barnabas reached out his hand. "David, give that back to me."

"No! I'm taking it back to Collinwood and burying it in the woods. Or maybe I'll put it in a bank in Switzerland, or I'll throw it in the Amazon river. Someplace that you'll never find it."

Barnabas still held the Colt revolver. The longer he stared at the golden gleam of the pocket watch in David's hand, the lighter the gun seemed to be in his hands. It floated upwards like a balloon that his hand was passively holding by the string.

"You're making a mistake, David. That kind of power is too great a temptation."

"Yeah, you should know. You're the one tempted by it, aren't you?"

"No."

"You miss it, don't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Julia did something to your vampire blood, so you can walk in the sunshine and eat real food and hold a crucifix in the palm of your hand. But you enjoyed being the undead, didn't you? Being immortal? Being powerful? Wasn't it the greatest high ever?"

"No, of course I don't miss it! Those advantages you speak of came at too high a price. All the lives I've destroyed… All my loved ones and family who suffered…"

"So you say, but if you had another way to live forever without becoming a blood-sucking creature of the night, you'd take it wouldn't you? Wouldn't you? Admit it, Barnabas, you want this." David dangled the pocket watch now, a mischievous teasing boy keeping a ball away from a small child. "Look at how you're holding that gun, halfway raised to threaten me. You want it so much. For once, please, be honest with me. You want it, don't you? Don't you!"

He cried out, "Yes! I want it! Give it to me, you little scamp!"

David clutched the pocket watch to his chest. "Then you'll have to shoot me for it. Go on! Have fun! It won't kill me, as long as I'm holding this. What are you waiting for? I can see it in your eyes. You're not a real vampire anymore, but you still have a murderous streak in you."

He looked aside to the corpse on the floor. Blood splattered on the wall and blood pooled underneath him. The color and the odor thrilled him. He felt drawn to the dark puddle, tempted to drop to his knees and lick it off the floor like a dog. His free hand curled into a fist.

"You're wrong, David," he whispered. "I don't enjoy killing. I just enjoy the blood."

"Wow, thank you. To finally hear you admit it, after all these years."

Slowly, the older man turned away from the corpse on the floor. He rotated on his smooth Oxford shoes, his whole body a rigid mannequin. "You were too young to understand, then, but you understand me now."

"Yeah, I understand a lot."

Barnabas took a step forward. David took a matching step backwards.

"Give me the watch," said the older man, holding out his hand with the gold band of his onyx ring shining darkly in the candlelight.

"No."

"I said, give it to me."

"Hell no."

Wrath surged up out of his core like an ocean wave. His jaw yawned wide open like a python, and his fangs erupted. He could feel them thrusting out—sharp and ready to bite—cold and itching to sink into warm flesh.

"Crap!" David scrambled backwards, ducking behind the kimono rack and the pile of _zabuton_ pillows.

Growling, the old vampire pursued him around the room, stepping over the clutter that David threw in his way: the smashed teacups, the jenga tower of hard-back books, the bento lunch tray, the manual typewriter, and a collection of assorted tortoise-shell hair combs. It all rattled and clattered between them, a tornado of detritus.

Barnabas a dark wraith prowled through the center of the maelstrom. His fangs bared. His mouth open wide, his eyes blazed with scarlet rage. How would the blood of a Phoenix taste, he wondered.

"What were you just saying!" David panted heavily, his bangs in sweaty streaks blocking his eyes. "Remember? About your regrets? I'm family too!"

Barnabas easily ducked a pair of thick wooden sandals that David threw at him. It felt good to be fast and agile again, to chase prey. Yet his vigor was imperfect. He had not fed enough from the bear spirit. Not quite what he used to be in his prime, he was better than an hour ago.

"Come here, David," he said from low in his throat, his voice resonating in the cavity of his un-breathing chest. "Come to me. I won't hurt you."

"No!"

David smashed into a standing lacquered screen. He grabbed part of the frame and whacked it against the wall to clear the last jagged edges of the design panel. Now he held a wooden stake at shoulder height like a mini-javelin.

"Stay back, cousin Barnabas, or I'll do it. I swear I will!"

Barnabas paused not because he was in danger. He recognized the wood as balsa—the brittle material used in making disposable chopsticks. If David were to try and use it, the stake would crumble into splinters before it so much as snagged on the lapel of his suit. Oak or pine would have been a better choice. What stopped him was the grim determination in the young man's brown eyes, so fierce and ready to fight. David looked elated in that terrible way of soldiers who had made their first victory and felt eager to charge into another fray, probably to their deaths. He had defeated his own demon master, confronted his childhood nightmares, and uncovered Barnabas's long-held secret. He looked ready to take on Satan himself and win. _I remember feeling that way, the first time I killed Angelique_. In that brief moment, Barnabas decided to allow the boy the enjoyment of this delusion that he could understand the world and all its magic, and all its evils.

"I… I lost my head," he said, lisping slightly on the fangs that were taking a little longer than usual to withdraw. "I apologize."

"Uh-huh." David lowered his arm a bit though he did not let go of the stake just yet.

Barnabas moved only his thumb to carefully release the Colt's hammer. He laid the heavy gun on top of the bureau and stepped away from it. "Let's get out of here."

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yes, it was nothing more than a momentary slip… 'off the wagon,' as they say. You won't tell Julia, will you? She'll be so disappointed in me."

David tried to smile and almost succeeded. "I'm glad you kept her with you. She's good for you. And I don't just mean what she's done to fix your blood."

"Yes," Barnabas agreed. "She is good for me."

At last, David sensed the change in him, that enough of his semblance of humanity had returned. He felt safe to drop the wooden stake. It rattled lightly on the stone floor.

Together they walked to the door, stepping over the bloody corpse on the way. "Careful," Barnabas said. "Don't tread in any of it. His blood may still have some sort of power."

"Okay."

"We should seal up this room forever. Do you know where we can obtain some quick-dry cement and a load of bricks?"

"Yeah I do," David said. "Lots of renovation going on, to make it more fun for tourists."

Barnabas passed easily through the door, but soon realized that David was not beside him. He turned around and saw the young man trapped, pushing at an invisible barrier of nonexistent glass.

"Cousin Barnabas, what the hell?"

"Ah yes, you didn't hear. You were, shall we say, incapacitated at the time. This room is built around an ancient ceremonial cave of the Ainu shaman, where they used to sacrifice bears and imprison demons. The rule of the chamber is this: by daylight hours, a living thing may take the occupant's place. By night, no living thing can cross through the door."

"But you passed through, no problem!"

He looked aside. "Technically speaking, I am not alive."

A respectful moment of silence passed between them.

"Oh no, are you saying I'm trapped in here, forever, like he was? That I can only leave if some pathetic slobbering slave comes to take my place for a day at a time? Oh my god, Barnabas, I can't live like that! I'll go crazy stuck in here. Help me! Do something!"

Barnabas looked David up and down his whole length. Then he looked beyond the young man, to the collection of candles and the portable gas-canister stove where a tea kettle sat ready to be boiled.

"Apparently, the only way for you to get out of there is the same way you came in."

David glanced to the charcoaled sheet. "How... How did I come in?"

"As a pile of ashes." Barnabas smoothly crossed inside. He went to the snack cart and selected three blue canisters of portable cooking-stove gas. He pushed them into David's hands and then moved around the room to gather candles and piles of old newspaper.

"Oh my god, you cannot be serious."

Barnabas crumpled up balls of newspaper and cast them, in papery bunnies, to David's feet. "Would you rather be stuck in this chamber for all eternity?"

He bowed his head and grumbled, "No."

"Then, hold still and stop fussing."

"Wait." He pulled off the shirt and stepped out of the drawstring trousers. He rolled them into a blue-and-white bundle and tossed them a few feet away. "Okay, I think I'm ready. Oh Jeez…"

"This will only sting for a moment."

David glanced over his shoulder as Barnabas approached with a flickering candle. "Promise you're not going to steal the pocket watch and leave me behind, when I'm... like that?"

The vampire's eyes glimmered darkly. "Trust me."

##

At the Narita Airport baggage counter, the officer checked David's passport and boarding pass. Then he asked, in a thick Japanese accent, "Do you have anything to declare?"

David Collins fingered the chain of the gold pocket watch that dangled from the front belt loop of his blue jeans. He smiled with lips closed in a thin line. "Nope."

The End


End file.
